Windows Weekly 790 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
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Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for windows weekly. Paul THRASS here, Mary Jo Foleys here. And unlike Microsoft, they do have subsid to share. At this time, we're gonna talk about a report that says windows 11, version 22 H two is coming in September and a surprising rumor that this might be the last big update of windows for some time to come stay tuned for the details. We'll talk about outlook for windows. They move the cheese again. And do you want animated widgets in your task bar? Well, Paul doesn't and he'll explain why it's all coming up next on windows, weekly podcasts you love

Twit intro (00:00:39):
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Leo Laporte (00:00:42):
This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:50):
This is windows weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley episode 790 recorded Wednesday, August 17th, 2022. Smuggling. This episode of windows weekly is brought to you by click up the productivity platform. That'll save you one day a week on work guaranteed use code windows to get 15% off click ups, massive unlimited plan for a year. Meaning you could start reclaiming your time for under $5 a month. Sign up today@clickup.com. But hurry, this offer ends soon and by INFR scale, INFR scale delivers industry leading data protection through backup and disaster recovery. Visit INFR scale.com/TWiT to sign up for a free demo and see how INFR scale protects your business today. It's time for windows weekly, the yes, dozers and winners. It's your turn to take over the channel and talk about the best operating system ever made Microsoft windows 10 and 11. Hello, Paul thro.com. You're in beautiful

Paul Thurrott (00:01:57):
Dos was pretty good.

Leo Laporte (00:01:58):
Yeah, it was pretty good. It's is pretty. It is pretty good. You are a beautiful eternal spring, Mexico. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> what's that all that eternal spring stuff all about there.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:10):
So if you look at the climate graph for almost any place on earth, you'll see this kind of big curve where the highs are really high and the lows are really low. And the, the Delta between them is big. But if you look at the one from Mexico city, it's not quite a straight line, but it's pretty close. So the high temperature difference between any month of the year and another is less than 10 degrees. And the low temperature is less than 10 degrees. So it's nice. It's basically the same weather aside from rain all year long.

Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
And that's why it says eternal spring on your TV.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:42):
Nevermind. It's because I have a YouTube channel called the eternal

Leo Laporte (00:02:45):
Spring. Oh, is that the name of your YouTube channel? Yes. Oh, it's all coming together now. <Laugh> and is your YouTube channel all about your place in Mexico city?

Paul Thurrott (00:02:58):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:02:59):
Mary Jo Foley. I figured it out.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:02):
You did?

Leo Laporte (00:03:03):
There's Mary Jo fall.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:04):
It's not eternal spring here.

Leo Laporte (00:03:05):
It is not. Is it? How hot is it in? In Manhattan.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:09):
It's only 80 today. Oh, nothing.

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
It's pretty good. We hit 101 yesterday.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:14):
Ooh <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:03:15):
Oh God, no, no,

Leo Laporte (00:03:18):
No, no, no, yeah, no. It is eternal hell here. <Laugh> yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah. Ooh, but it's over now. It's cooling off. In fact there's a 38% chance of rain, which is very weird.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:32):
You need it.

Leo Laporte (00:03:34):
Oh God. Do we need it? Holy moly. Anyway. <laugh> how are you?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:43):
I'm well, good.

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
Good. How are you? Mary Jo. And I would like a word with you, Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:50):
Okay. Can

Leo Laporte (00:03:50):
You stop posting all those food pictures on Instagram? You're making us hungry.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:55):
I have one more to do, and then we're going home. <Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:58):
Good. It's about time. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
You're making us hungry.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:03):
Wow. The thing that's classic to me is with the exception of, I think one, no two places. All of those are within a seven minute walk of my apartment.

Leo Laporte (00:04:12):
That's amazing. Wow. That is always blowing me away. Well, yeah. I'm glad you you have decided not to, to leave us behind

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:24):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:04:25):
And

Paul Thurrott (00:04:25):
I, I wish I could leave everything behind. I wanted to stay here. We have to fly home

Leo Laporte (00:04:29):
Tomorrow and I'm feeling yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:31):
Not, not in the mood.

Leo Laporte (00:04:32):
So why go home at all? That's my question.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:35):
Well, we have kids and pets. Oh yeah, sure. Things to reconcile,

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
Things like that.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:42):
Financially real estate wise.

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):
It's coming to a, it's a head though. Isn't it? <Laugh> you are, you are about to move down there aren't you? I can tell I feel it.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:55):
Well, we're gonna split our time for sure. I don't think we're, I don't believe we'd move here full, but we'll see.

Leo Laporte (00:05:02):
Let's talk about windows. Shall we?

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:05):
Why not? Why

Paul Thurrott (00:05:06):
Not? Why not?

Leo Laporte (00:05:07):
Why not? Is there anything to say sure. Is it's the, it's the silly season for, you know, the other shows because late August, you know, nothing much. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:17):
All it is is rumors about what day things are gonna get

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
Enough. Yeah. Things like that. Yeah. But no. So let's

Paul Thurrott (00:05:23):
Start off with a rumor about what day things are gonna get released.

Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
Oh, okay. Exactly. Exactly. So tell me

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:31):
The rumor is from windows central. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> windows 1122 H two. We'll start rolling out on September 20th, which is the Tuesday after patch Tuesday in September,

Leo Laporte (00:05:45):
September 20th. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:49):
So yeah, I have no idea if that's true. I haven't heard anything about a day, but you know, we thought it was gonna be September or October. We've been kind of saying that over long fall, fall

Paul Thurrott (00:05:59):
Update. Well, and it seems like it kind of came together quickly enough that October was a little late. So it's one of those things that makes sense. The most interesting thing, I, you know, the date is whatever, but the right, the most interesting thing about this report to me is this notion of moments, which Zach had reported previously and how they might, they, Microsoft intend to release at least one before the end of the year. And that, that will be where we see things like file Explorer, tabs, and suggested action. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:31):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:31):
That's okay. And this is, this kind of rolling release schedule is a nightmare. <Laugh> so I'm so happy that we're entering into this era.

Leo Laporte (00:06:44):
Yep. Maybe it'll fix my PC that's I can always hope. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> great. It's gonna fix my computer and windows will run beautifully and all would be well. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:55):
You know, it's still gonna be terrible, but it will look nice.

Leo Laporte (00:06:58):
<Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:58):
It will look better. It'll look

Leo Laporte (00:07:00):
Nice. Yeah. So you Paul you're on 22 H two mm-hmm <affirmative>. I am on 22 H two here. Cuz you told me to

Paul Thurrott (00:07:07):
See, I, I feel like you're misunderstanding what I said to

Leo Laporte (00:07:10):
You, Mary Jo though. You're probably still using windows 10. I'm guessing.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:16):
No, no I'm using windows 1121 H two, like a sane and

Leo Laporte (00:07:21):
Normal, like a normal person would. Yes. What happened at 22 H one?

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:27):
Was there one? No, there wasn't one. No, because

Paul Thurrott (00:07:29):
No, because when last

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:30):
Fall they said there would only be one feature update per year.

Leo Laporte (00:07:34):
Oh and this is it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:35):
Foreseeable future. Okay. 21. So anyone H 1 22 H two.

Leo Laporte (00:07:39):
Right. I knew that. I just thought I'd ask for those who were puzzled like me.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:43):
And then if, if windows central is right, if Z Bowden's right, then we suddenly go to one major update of windows every three years. What? 20 in 2024. So he's saying windows 12 would be if, if they call it that

Leo Laporte (00:07:57):
In 2020, it'll

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:58):
Be 20, 24. And in between you could have up to four things called moments,

Leo Laporte (00:08:04):
Moments,

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:05):
Other updates. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:08:07):
It's just a moment

Paul Thurrott (00:08:08):
I'm having a moment just thinking about it, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:08:10):
Moment where'd they come up with that?

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:13):
That sounds like such a PR term, right? Doesn't

Paul Thurrott (00:08:15):
It, it is total it's it's the someone who makes slides to explain new features in a product we'll use these terms. Like we're trying to light up new experiences. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, you know, it's a moment. It's a

Leo Laporte (00:08:26):
Wow.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:27):
Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:29):
So he's saying we'll get 22 H two starting on September 20th. It'll start rolling out to the mainstream. And then sometime before the end of this calendar year, if the dates stay as they are now, people will get this update. We don't even know how through windows update maybe, or through one of these other various update channels they have. And it'll give you the tabbed file Explorer and it will give you suggest, suggested actions and maybe some other features they don't know. They have not confirmed any of this. The dates, the thing about moments they haven't said when tabbed file Explorer will show up, they've said none of these things, right? So this is all rumors. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:09:07):
All speculation.

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:08):
Yeah. Which

Paul Thurrott (00:09:09):
Is fine. Yeah. Well, but, and Zach is a reliable recorder

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:14):
For this kind thing. I would say. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:09:15):
Very like, he clearly has good sources.

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:17):
Yep. He does. Yep. Agree. Yeah. So I guess the thing I take away from all this and our, our next story is part of this too, is we're moving into a new way of windows and a new way. We have to think about windows, right? That we haven't had for a while, for a while. It's been very, yeah. After windows eight, I think they kind of said, okay, that was a, that was a fiasco. We should stop trying to just roll features out Willie nilly. And we should stop just thinking this is a mobile operating system, which is what they were trying to turn it into. And now the pendulum is swinging back and we're going because Panos, Panos thinks we should be thinking about windows. Like it's that it's an equivalent to Android and iOS, which it is not. But he's, he's gonna update it that same way. Even though business users do not want this, but here we go. I

Paul Thurrott (00:10:12):
Don't. Yeah. Geez. I'm so really mixed on this. I, I, I think, well the whole windows is a service thing, which actually you were right, but you're right. By the way, it came out of windows eight. The, it did when Steve baller announced windows eight one a year after windows eight, he talked about, we're gonna move into this rapid release era mm-hmm <affirmative> and they did 8 1 8, 1, 1, et cetera, and then added right. You know, brought the Stein, Randy back eventually. And then they did windows 10 and windows 10 windows as a service. Remember they originally said three P truck updates a year. They went to two. This did not go well <laugh> and yeah, but the, but the interesting thing I hate to, I, I hate to say this because it, you know, I don't want them to make these many updates, but the thing that they did do in this timeframe was they made it technically more reliable to update windows mm-hmm <affirmative> outside of the major release path.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:06):
Right. In other words, mm-hmm, <affirmative> we can just pick and choose little components of windows and update them. And they actually seem to have done a good job with that. And I think this is what enables these moments as we're gonna call them. Yeah. You know, functional updates, right. Cause app app updates are easy enough and you can do some work like they did to bring more and more into the app store over time. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but really what you want is that app store style, updating capability, but for discrete operating system components. And I feel like they actually got it there. As much as I want to complain about windows as a service. Right. Because that's

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:38):
Is terrible. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:39):
But yeah. So I, I, I don't know, will it be confusing to people to go to windows 1122 H two and a month or two, and then go to get a, all of a sudden one day, wake up and have a new file. Explorer tab interface two months later. I don't know. I mean, I, if you use something as simple as a Chromebook, you're getting MOS updates, you get a yeah. Popup that says, Hey, here's, what's new. You see this in browser updates. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> you see it in mobile app updates. I mean, maybe this is the way of the world. And as long as they can do it reliably,

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:16):
Right. I think it's gonna be fine for consumers, right? Consumers. Yeah. People who are tech savvy people listen to the show. It's not gonna be an issue for us and, and people like us. Right, right. The people's gonna be an issue for our businesses. Right. And so say a business decides to roll out to windows 1122 H two, they train their users. Here's what it looks like. This is everything. And then one day their user comes in and clicks on file Explorer and is, and the navigation

Paul Thurrott (00:12:43):
Is different. It's it's get tabs, right? Oh yeah. That's the other thing, actually, that, that, that change is actually visually more jarring. And a functional thing that I think will screw people up. So we don't, because moments is basically a rumor. Microsoft has never confirmed it. The other half of the story is we don't know whether Microsoft will provide group policies or whatever, to allow organizations not to get those moments. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and then a year goes by, and maybe you would just get 'em in bulk with some 23 H two release or whatever. Yep. We like this. Do we do we like, this is this good? We are uncomfortable with it because we hate change Leo <laugh> and I, I, and because frankly, they haven't done a great job, you know, I think I, windows is a service is the big example of making these kinds of transitions. So when you hear every three years there, anyone who's been around for a while, like we have is like, oh, thank God. You know, this is much better, but the asterisks to that is, oh, but we were gonna release moments throughout the year. So it's not really one feature up update a year. Right. It's one big feature update a year with several functional changes over the course of the year as well. What Zach, this is Zach

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:52):
Has heard, by the way, what Zach has heard is they may do away with the big feature update in the fall. So there might not be a 23 H two next year. Okay. But we don't know. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:04):
I give up.

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:05):
Yeah. Just when you get used to,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:06):
I just, I just, I think

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:07):
Seriously, you know what, I think the idea of giving people more features when they're ready is good. Like the theory of that is good. Like, why should you have to wait three years or even one year to get all these features? But

Paul Thurrott (00:14:20):
Yes,

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:21):
I they've gotta communicate this clearly. And their track record on this is very poor, right? Like, so you, it would be nice to get a little bar to come up and say, Hey, today we refresh you and you get this tabbed file Explorer. That would be helpful. But I feel like the thing they're not doing, because they wanna have this surprise element is not telling people in advance what they're gonna do. Like if they come out in the fall and have a press conference and say, we're gonna do this moment saying, here's how this is gonna work. You'll be able as an it manager to shut off these features and never have your users get them until you're ready to roll 'em out. I think it would just calm people down. I do.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:57):
So I think for businesses though, enterprises in particular, you still have to have some notion of versioning because that's how the support life cycle is built. Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> so if, if what, you're what you're suggesting, because I don't, this is not a, we don't know what they're doing exactly, but right. No, no, I, I, I still feel like there would have to be a 23 H two, just because there's some point of where you collect it all together, issue as an ISO or something that businesses can deploy PC makers can put on their hardware. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and that the once a year cadence for something like that just makes sense because that's the world iOS, Android, mm-hmm, <affirmative> from OS they all do this. But not Mar yeah. I mean, from the perspective of a consumer, if they're gonna stick with windows 11 for three years, or for some Indi definite time period. Yeah. I mean, adding new features is fine. It's just, I feel like you have to name these things somehow. Like you have to be able to say agree. The reason this is exciting is because we have this new release called something and it's exciting. And here's the list of features. It gets a little Murier when you're just releasing new features, Willy nilly every couple months and know 'em in a couple more months and, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:07):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:08):
If it's not,

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:09):
It's like everything else say they there's, we don't even know if there'll be a schedule. Like we don't know, will it be quarterly, right. Or will you get like three moments in the first half of the year? And then one before the year ends, we don't know. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:20):
I'm definitely gotta have at least three moments. And also

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:23):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:16:24):
I, listen, I, you wanna say, you wanna give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and say, look, you're evolving it. That makes sense. You know, things change as we move forward. Yes, absolutely. And yet this, the, the, the more cynical part of me, which is, most of me says, you know, you've changed this so many times. It suggests you have no plan and no idea what you're doing. <Laugh> and that you go down these paths and they don't work out. And so you just change it yet again. Yeah. Yeah. And I

Leo Laporte (00:16:50):
We've hypothesized in the past that it's because of changing leadership, like yeah, we have, yeah. Sinofsky leaves. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so his plans out the window, new guy says, I got a better idea and they do it that way for

Paul Thurrott (00:17:05):
No that's right. That's right. And, and by the way that Sinofsky leaving Synsky was the every three year guy he left and then WeDo, we windows adopted more of a mobile phone strategy. It was no coincidence that the person in charge of windows phone went over to windows. After that mm-hmm <affirmative>, there was a leadership gap there for what a year and a half, two years or something where no one really was directly responsible. Windows is not directly wasn't directly respond directly represented on the senior leadership team. And now Panos pane who comes outta the hardware division is doing, you know, putting his imprint on it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> whatever that

Leo Laporte (00:17:41):
May be. Do you think this is his idea? Moments is a very POC

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:45):
Kind of thing. That's a Panos idea all the way. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:17:47):
It is. Yeah. Yeah. I can almost taste

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:51):
This moment. Can you taste

Paul Thurrott (00:17:52):
The moment? So branding. Yeah. Branding is whatever. I, I, I don't that term is, you know, you throw up in your mouth a little bit when you hear it, but yeah. Who cares? This is the term I agree with you. It's just the term. And, and it, from a technical perspective, I think it's what I said earlier. It's just, they did the back end work to make this kind of thing possible. We can call it whatever we want to call it. But releasing new features in the operating system, every so often keeping it fresh, you know, like she, like Mary just said, it's, this is good for consumers. Yeah. Well, it'll be easier for them to understand what's going on. I guess. I think so. Because the rest of the world's like this, right. Sometimes you wake up and your iPhone rebooted and Hey, look, you have a new, whatever. I don't know what they're doing on iPhone, but you know, there's a new thing here, you know, whatever it is, some privacy thing or whatever. Yeah. Like that happens. It happens everywhere.

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:37):
I know. I think the thing everybody has to remember though, is Microsoft is a business company. Like, yes, they have 30% or whatever of their user base consumers, but the rest is business. Right. And this is what happened to windows eight. They just, Microsoft steamrolled the business community. They gave them all the feedback they needed about what a disaster windows eight was gonna be. And they said, Nope, we know better. And we're gonna do it this way. Right. I feel like we're kind of on the teetering on the edge of this again. Right. Like, you know what, all the mobile platforms do this, so we should do this on windows. The problem is windows is not the same as IO. It's an Android, right. It's a business operating system for a lot of people. Right. So this is why, this is why it gets a little dicey to me about, you know, it sounds fun. Sounds great. But like, is it really good for businesses to do this this way

Paul Thurrott (00:19:24):
Again, to, to put myself in the weird position of defending Microsoft? I guess I would also say, and I, I think you'd agree with this, looking back over the past 20 years, you know, businesses move very slowly, maybe too slowly. And, and every one of the, anyone who likes to move at that slow, you know, pace will point to all the things that went wrong, you know, whatever, whatever it was, they can always point to something. And yeah, for sure there have been problems if you're still citing windows NT 4.0, SB two it's time to update your criticism. Cuz there's been a lot newer things that have happened since then, but right. I, like I said, I, I feel like they've done a good job on the back end. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> more seamlessly upgrading windows. Maybe it's time for businesses to rethink. They handle these things. And maybe businesses aren't giving their users enough credit. They handle great change on the phones they use every day. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> why can't they handle what will basically be minor change on the desktop operating system they use for work? I'm just, it's almost, I'm not playing

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:26):
Devil's advocate.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:26):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm not literally saying I believe that, but it's, I dunno, it's an interesting debate.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:33):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it is like one of my friends who works at Microsoft always says, he said, you know, who hates change the most? It, it hates change, right? Because yeah. Right. They're the ones who have to deal with all the questions and all the problems when people don't understand things and my computer won't do what it used to, blah, blah, blah. Right? So until you have a whole new generation of it, people who think change is fun and change is exciting. <Laugh> and I, I

Paul Thurrott (00:20:57):
Understand how it works on

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:58):
Phones,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:58):
Right. I don't think it has to be fun, but what it has to do is not be disruptive. So in other words, if it is spending a lot of time manually updating systems every month with patch Tuesday or every year with version updates or whatever it is, whatever their schedule is there. If that's what they're spending time on, if Microsoft fixed that process so that you never had to worry about it, they could be more proactive and do things for their users rather than responding to complaints all the time. And that's not a horrible world. It's just that I think these people get so caught up in what work has been for so long that they might not be open to the fact that this could be better.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:37):
Yeah. Yep. Fair.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:40):
Maybe I just don't do

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:41):
This work. I feel like, I feel like the, the one thing that has to be good and the track record here is bad is communication, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:21:49):
Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:52):
Yeah. Yeah. Like let's, let's bring the second story in on this because I feel like this is related, right? So we've found out yesterday. Well, we didn't find out till this morning that Microsoft is now going to turn on notifications in widgets, on the desktop in windows 11 and you know how they told people about this. It's a really fine print thing in the Microsoft release health page in Microsoft docs, they didn't announce it. They didn't tell people anywhere. Tom Warren at the verge saw this and wrote a story about it. I contacted Microsoft and I'm like, Hey, are you gonna tell people kind of more broadly that this is happening? And can you turn this off? So this would be, if you have widgets on your task bar, like say the finance widget or, or breaking news, like when things are happening, it'll be like flashing down on your desktop. Like, you'll see on the task bar, like the stock ticker will be changing and stuff. And I'm like, you know, for some people that's gonna be super and they're gonna love that. They're gonna think that's awesome. And for other people that's gonna be so distracting. And if you can't turn that off, then people are just gonna shut widgets off. Right. Because that's just gonna be overwhelming. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:23:02):
This is in many ways, the quintessential windows 11 feature, because in windows 10, they had something very much like the widgets called news and interests. And the way it was originally configured was you would mouse over the little icon for the thing. It was a weather forecast, just like we have now in windows 11. And this thing would pop up and it was really kind of jarring, you know? And so they built a control into it. So you could say, well, don't, don't pop up the wi the news and information panel. If I just mouse over it, let me click on it. And that will make it come out. So they made it configurable after people complained. So you move forward to windows 11, we have the same thing. They call it witches. Now they put it in a different place. The original version was just an icon, but over time they added the weather forecast bit. And so there are people who probably don't mind seeing the weather there on the task. Right. It's a nice little feature mm-hmm <affirmative> right. But if you MOS over it, widgets comes up and there's, there is no control to not do that. So when you say, will there be a control to turn off this notification feature notifications?

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:00):
Mm-Hmm

Paul Thurrott (00:24:00):
<Affirmative> I don't know. I mean, there's no, I don't know. Maybe, you know, but it's, it's so like Microsoft too, you know, there's people in Redmond kind of rubbing their hands together. Oh, I can't wait till people see this. It's gonna be such a moment for them. You know, <laugh> this is gonna be, you know, and it's

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:16):
Like, no pun intended. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:24:17):
Where, where most people like, I'll be someone like me who uses computers for work, and it's just trying to get their job done. Yeah. We'll see some distracting thing in the corner and be like, what,

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:26):
What the heck is going on over here? What is happening? Right. Like,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:28):
Why is, why is this thing moving around now? Yeah. You know, and it's why

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:32):
A stock arrow going up and then it's going down. And then it's like, like, you're like, wait a minute. What is happening right now?

Paul Thurrott (00:24:37):
I think they, I think they underestimate how badly these things can impact people.

Leo Laporte (00:24:42):
How cranking having people that you are. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:45):
Well, like people are, I would say, you know, can be very Joseph people.

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
You think to people really you're gonna go, oh man, I don't want that arrow moving.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:55):
Sorry. Like if you're driving a car or you're do, do you want one day for there to be this thing flashing in the corner while you're driving down the road and then you, you have to look at it to figure out what it is and it it's, it's just

Leo Laporte (00:25:06):
You and it's not, of course you could turn it off. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:09):
You could turn widgets off.

Leo Laporte (00:25:11):
Oh, can't turn off the animation in the widgets. Right,

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:15):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:25:17):
They've

Paul Thurrott (00:25:17):
Made it less configurable. And now they're adding features. Which of course they will. It's you know, we're moving forward. That's fine. Yeah. I just, I, I wish there was a little more thought yeah. About this kind of stuff. You know, and communi like Mary Jo said,

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:28):
Communication is the, is the problem here, right? Because it felt almost like they're sliding this in, in a place that most people will not hear about it until it happens on their computer. Right. It's gonna happen over the coming weeks. Right. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:25:41):
Think about the two alternatives here. We're gonna surprise people with this new feature. We're not gonna announce it. We're just gonna surprise him. Yeah. One way to do it is one day you put up your computer and this window pops up in the middle and says, Hey, congratulations, you just got this new feature for widgets. Here's what it does. Here's where you can turn it off. If you don't want it, blah, blah, blah. This is how it works. Great. Or just one day, all of a sudden you're working. Like I said, down in the corner. Yeah. What you like, what's going wrong down here. Is this malware? What is it like? I, I, I don't understand that line of thinking. Like, it doesn't make sense to me.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:11):
No. You know what? And they're gonna do B option B of those things you just said, and you know why they're gonna do that. Right. Because a lot of people don't want widgets. Right. Or they haven't really clicked on widgets or they haven't checked it out. Right. So if they see something flashing, Microsoft's thinking, okay, if they see something flashing, they're gonna click that. Then we're gonna, they're gonna see the whole thing with widgets and all the possibilities. And they're gonna start seeing, oh, that's where we put ads and where they can search with Bing. Right. So it's just like, I feel like it's a trick almost. And I don't, I don't like feeling like I'm being tricked.

Leo Laporte (00:26:41):
<Laugh>, it's a trick. It's a trap. It

Paul Thurrott (00:26:43):
Is. This is exactly like crap where the PC makers pre-install on windows. Yeah, we did. I did these studies for signature PEI group, which is long gone. But at the time you would, you know, bring a bunch of people in a room show. 'em Different configurations have 'em take notes and feedback. And it's, it's long like a kids in the hall joke. You know, it's like, what we found after all these years was that nine outta 10 people can't stand it. But one out of 10 is like, oh my God, I got extra stuff on my computer. That's fun. You know? And those people are out there and, and less humorously, there will be people who may be follow stocks. And for some reason, this is how they do it. And they may wanna see a little stock update in the corner and God bless those people. There's nothing wrong with that. But inflicting that kind of UI on the majority of people who don't want it. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:27):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:27:28):
Is so is it your prediction that there will be a hue and cry that people will be upset about this or that nobody will notice and nothing will happen, or you know, that somebody at the verge will write an article, Hey, this is exciting. Your windows widgets are moving now. Which, which, which is the three alternatives that,

Paul Thurrott (00:27:49):
That, that part will happen for sure. <Laugh> I don't had already an article telling, Hey, you can turn it off, had to turn it off. So yeah. I don't, I don't know. It's hard to say. I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:58):
It is hard to

Paul Thurrott (00:27:59):
Say, I don't know. I mean, maybe,

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:02):
I don't know. I think, I feel like businesses already, probably any businesses who are already on windows 11, like big businesses will have already turned off widgets and that's just not even on, right. Like, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:13):
Like who, who wants this thing on like people who are not getting work done. Yeah. You know, like I've been trying to screw around all day at work. So I'm reading news stories over here in this feed. Yeah. Instead of getting actual work done or who uses windows day to day for work? Like what do

Leo Laporte (00:28:24):
You wait a minute though? I'm I'm working in my widgets. Here's an article useful layering tricks when styling a corset with straps. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> see. See, I, you know, I need that. If, if that hadn't shown up there, I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:39):
All right. Fair enough. No, I think you've come debunked. My thoughts. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:28:42):
Goodness for that. So yeah. Okay. So I'm okay. Just bear with me cuz I'm slow. Yes. I won't have to open that little widgets tray to see the motion. It will be there. Right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:58):
The automated

Paul Thurrott (00:28:58):
And the hope is that that animation will cause you to click on it. That's hard as you go

Leo Laporte (00:29:03):
To the web, it's the attractive and

Paul Thurrott (00:29:04):
Load edge and load MSN and load Bing. And then

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):
Yeah. Remember in, in in Pacman, in fact, all the arcade video games, they had something called attract mode, which would be the going on, on the screen. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> in the arcade

Paul Thurrott (00:29:19):
In animation

Leo Laporte (00:29:20):
And hoping to draw you in to play the game. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:22):
That's exactly right.

Leo Laporte (00:29:23):
So they're adding a attract mode to which it's basically.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:27):
So yeah, no. And actually you can kind of follow the evolution of this thing. This is again like Mary Jo said it's completely to drive you to Microsoft products and services. The only reason it exists. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:29:37):
It's just like edge, user benefit saying, come on. You'd really like to use the thing is you're.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:40):
Yeah. So the first, first version was, was stuck in with the other buttons. It didn't animate. Didn't do anything. No one saw it. So Microsoft came up with, I think is an a genius insidious idea. Hey, here's the, here's the plan. Let's put it where the start button used to go. Exactly. Cause that people will, will automatically click on this thing. Right. And then they were like, all right, well that didn't work. Nobody nobody's

Leo Laporte (00:29:59):
Touching it. Nobody's touching it. We'll put the,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:01):
Well the weather on it, the weather will get people going for sure. And that probably did something. I think both those things did something to raise engagement. And this is the next step. Like, well, you could have stocks in there. You could have sports scores, you could have, you know, name anything. Animations will get the track mode basically. I'm sure that's probably what it's called internally. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> 

Leo Laporte (00:30:19):
By the way, I blame you. How do we

Paul Thurrott (00:30:21):
Get this

Leo Laporte (00:30:21):
Thing? When I first installed windows 11 on this machine, my widgets were useful news. It was good stuff. I didn't click on any of the service. So now number one, my second husband of five years would like to inherit part of my home as he pay. Okay. here's a, here's a, a celebrity mugshots article from, from Wonderwall. That's exciting. Yeah. This is above the fold, California. Coastal destination is the most popular road trip in the world. Insurance study says,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:51):
All right. So here's two, two little tips about the widget bar widget. Actually it's what's the term, the widget board is the little, the literal name of this thing. You, the things that are news stories are not widgets. Those are cards. They're from content sources. They're

Leo Laporte (00:31:05):
Cards from new sources. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:06):
News and entertainment sources. Yeah. you can do two things. Well actually three things you can add widgets to it. So widgets are the things that will go at the top. Like weather stocks.

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
That's the plus whatever, when it says plus yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:19):
Yeah. That's right. You can, so that will push some of

Leo Laporte (00:31:21):
Weather. That's nice. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:22):
That's one

Leo Laporte (00:31:24):
Photo. You could also

Paul Thurrott (00:31:24):
Go, you could spend the time to go through each of these cards and you find one where you're like, well, this is terrible. This is a little.dot, dot thing. You click that. And you say hide stories from this news source. Like people magazine, you might not want whatever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So if youer stories like this,

Leo Laporte (00:31:38):
Oh this is actually the best. This is much better. I'm liking this.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:40):
The best thing you can do is click on something called manage interests. And it goes up to the web and that, because this is all MSN, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And there's an interesting thing, you know, when you sign up for like a music streaming service, one of the first things you do is go through a wizard and it says, show us which artists you like, and it, you know, kind of formulates feeds based on your interest. There's a tuner feed feature where instead of going through individual, you know, things one at a time, it will, it will say, Hey, show us some of the things you like. Yeah. And then if you, if you actually take the time to do this, the, the feed isn't as terrible as it is in the beginning when it shows the kind of stuff that

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
You're saying. So I can get rid of Cleveland baseball insider. I think that's probably, I

Paul Thurrott (00:32:21):
Don't know. Well, I, I, I mean, I wouldn't, but

Leo Laporte (00:32:22):
Fewer stories like this, or completely hide stories if I want, but

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:26):
Now you'll get Columbus, cider

Leo Laporte (00:32:29):
And Florida,

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:30):
Like, I feel like this thing doesn't work. The custom thing doesn't work.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:34):
So actually I it's.

Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
Oh yeah, wait, wait, I replaced it with something called RO ball.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:38):
It's like Instagram. It actually does work a lot better than it used to. It does. It used to be terrible. Yeah, it really does.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:43):
Oh, it used to not even take stuff away. It would just give you the exact same story from a different source, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:32:47):
Yeah. Yep. No, it's got, it has gotten a lot better. It really has.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:50):
Is it okay? Okay. Good

Leo Laporte (00:32:51):
To hear. MLB world re reacts to Fernando TTIs JRS, bobblehead news. Hey, I can't live without bobblehead news.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:01):
How, how was that? Not the top story in the New York times today.

Leo Laporte (00:33:04):
I know, you know what I did? Oh, see, here's what I went wrong. Okay. So it was giving me the Kansas city Royals versus the Minnesota TWiTns score in the top left corner. Sure, sure. Don't care about either of those. So I thought customize this widget, the only choice that really gives me is MLB. Oh, I selected MLB. And what I really care about is the giants

Paul Thurrott (00:33:27):
Is the giants or what?

Leo Laporte (00:33:28):
Yeah. Yes. Let me add them instead. And now I'll see. Oh, now I'm seeing the giants score. Okay. So it just take, but they, but you know what nobody ever wants to do this either. That's the other problem with this?

Paul Thurrott (00:33:41):
Well, like I said, though, it, it's not, you could do it in a way that doesn't take a lot of time because really it's tedious to go story by story and say no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you do that, there's a little wizard on the web that actually

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
Works. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:54):
Pretty well.

Leo Laporte (00:33:56):
This is, you know what, this is definitely from the mobile phone experience. This is, this

Paul Thurrott (00:34:00):
Is, this is, well, it's a fee. I, I, I spend most of my time on my phone when I read like looking at feeds, basically mm-hmm

Leo Laporte (00:34:06):
<Affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:08):
Yeah. And I think that, you know, Microsoft sees that engagement and they want, like, we've been saying, wants this thing to be more like a mobile platform. Well, we'll put, we'll put a phone in there.

Leo Laporte (00:34:16):
Yeah. I don't mind it so much. As long as it's hidden behind. And my the top widget is a, is the weather, so it's hidden behind the weather. Is that that's the default. Is that normal?

Paul Thurrott (00:34:28):
Yeah. But you, yeah, it is. And if you, you can customize that. So for example, like when I come to Mexico, it changes it to Mexico. Oh, nice. If I always wanted it to be back home, you can configure it to do that. That will impact the display you see in the task bar of the forecast. Right. It won't always show you here unless that's what you want. It's not, you know, it's, it's not a hundred percent terrible. It was. Yeah. About a year ago. It was a hundred percent terrible. It's just 70% terrible now. Yeah. So,

Leo Laporte (00:34:58):
Okay. Yeah. I'm adding some, I think a

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:00):
Lot of people are like me. Like they remember they tried it, it didn't customize. They're just like, ah, give up, eh, doesn't work. Right. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:08):
Well, I mean, it was terrible in the beginning. My God, it was very terrible. All of the top stories were like celebrity wearing next to nothing, you know, from some pop sugar or some whatever terrible sites. Yeah. But it's gotten, like I said, it's gotten better.

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:23):
Okay. All right.

Leo Laporte (00:35:24):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:25):
I still turn it off. I don't care. I don't want this. I'm working on my computer. I'm not like I don't same. No, I don't even care about the weather when I work. I'm just working. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:35:32):
I like it. It's just a, you know, and I don't, you know, the only thing that bugs me is if I move my accidentally move my master, the lower left, it will right. Pop

Paul Thurrott (00:35:40):
Up. And yep. I would love to turn that off. Yeah. You gotta make things explicit. You know, I, you wanna click on it to make it happen. Obviously

Leo Laporte (00:35:48):
Also it's a little unintuitive about, you know, how it works, so yep. That if only

Paul Thurrott (00:35:56):
Someone would write

Leo Laporte (00:35:56):
A book about this. Oh <laugh> Hey, where could I find something for podcast? Something

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:01):
Like a podcast.

Leo Laporte (00:36:03):
Great. Yeah. Like

Paul Thurrott (00:36:04):
Widgets your widget. What

Leo Laporte (00:36:06):
Would you call hands on widgets? I don't know. Paul's hands on

Paul Thurrott (00:36:12):
Taken

Leo Laporte (00:36:12):
Yet. No. Yes. Hands on windows. How

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:17):
Sras doing pause on windows. He's he's signed

Leo Laporte (00:36:20):
Up pow, pow <laugh>. Paul's hands on windows is normally hidden behind a pay wall in the club, but we're gonna do a public version of the windows shortcuts that you did. So that's coming out this week. So everybody get to see that on the YouTube channel on youtube.com/the YouTubes on the tubes. If, and if you like it, you can either subscribe to hands on windows by itself for 2 99 or join club TWiT for $7, 6 99 a month. And you'll get that. And all of the shows add free. Plus hands on Mac, you probably don't care about that so much. <Laugh> no, probably care. Even less about the untitled Linux show. Yeah. <Laugh> Stacey's book club. You might enjoy that. There's a, you

Paul Thurrott (00:37:04):
Know what though? I think people need to stay abreast of things yes. That they don't use, or like, and that's true. Not just of tech. I mean, I think one of the problems with this widgets thing in life in general today is that you can tune it down just to the baloney that you believe <laugh>, you know, and don't get to see what's going on in the whole world. I think

Leo Laporte (00:37:23):
It's important to pick filter bubble problem. Yeah. I want

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:26):
Myy. I don't want any

Leo Laporte (00:37:26):
Other baloney. My baloney <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:37:29):
No, everyone does that's and, and it's,

Leo Laporte (00:37:31):
It's very, did you see, by

Paul Thurrott (00:37:32):
The way, very common. There's

Leo Laporte (00:37:33):
A big black market in Mexican baloney in the us <laugh> did you see that? No. No. So Paul it's

Paul Thurrott (00:37:42):
I home with a, a suitcase of a baloney

Leo Laporte (00:37:45):
It's called Chim X. It's a Mexican baloney. You can get it down there for like $8 a, you know, a tube, like it's big thing and sell it for $80 up here, cuz it's like, it's banned.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:59):
Okay. But my flight costs $800. So how am I making money?

Leo Laporte (00:38:03):
Bring 10 of them.

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:04):
He's taking notes right now. I can see

Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
They <laugh>. They they stopped recently. They stopped a Volkswagen with like 500 pounds of Mexican baloney. You

Paul Thurrott (00:38:13):
Know, what'd be good is you could, you could form the bologna into the shape of a person and then use the HOV lane to get in more quickly.

Leo Laporte (00:38:19):
This is from Texas monthly.com. Why are border smugglers, traffic and baloney? Tons of contraband lunch. Meat has been seized at the UX Mexico border. So I,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:33):
I have no

Leo Laporte (00:38:35):
Find go out and find, let me get the name, baloney,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:39):
A Chub. It's the new avocado,

Leo Laporte (00:38:41):
A Chub, the they call it a Chub of baloney. That's cuz it's kind of chubby. You'll you'll face a fine of a thousand dollars or more if caught, but in Mexico, a nine pound roll of SHM X, the most popular brand of smuggled Chubbs cost 10 to $15 in the us the same role, 80 to $120. I'm just saying Paul, because in the

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:02):
Pork, right? Yes. That's why they,

Leo Laporte (00:39:04):
You're not supposed to. And the us bans it because you know, mad cow disease and stuff like that. Don't you know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:10):
Tofu, baloney. What's wrong with this guy?

Leo Laporte (00:39:12):
Well, I'm just saying Paul, have you had any Balone in Mexico?

Paul Thurrott (00:39:15):
I have not. I've had good food.

Leo Laporte (00:39:17):
<Laugh> baloney. Good food.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:19):
Speaking of good food. Leo look.

Leo Laporte (00:39:22):
Oh, what's that? I got,

Paul Thurrott (00:39:23):
I got an AOR frescos.

Leo Laporte (00:39:25):
What flavor is that? Is that a har Chatta? Is that a pineapple? What flavor is that? Can

Paul Thurrott (00:39:30):
Canal

Leo Laporte (00:39:30):
Lobe. Canal. Lobe. So good. Like a Froy that is sounds good. I'm so jealous.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:36):
A cubic ton of cantaloupe

Leo Laporte (00:39:38):
That and a smuggled Chub. And you got lunch. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:39:43):
Sit on the stairs downstairs

Leo Laporte (00:39:45):
And you got lunch. Go by. I just thought I there's a website called taco literacy. You might want to check out that has the whole inside story on smuggle chubs. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:00):
Thank you for

Leo Laporte (00:40:00):
That. You're welcome.

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:01):
Just in case you wanna know

Leo Laporte (00:40:03):
<Laugh> you're welcome. How long have we been doing this? You know what? I should probably do it that right now, Jesus, I feel like we've been doing this a long time. I

Paul Thurrott (00:40:14):
Feel that way

Leo Laporte (00:40:15):
Every day. And the only way we can break it up is by telling you about our fabulous sponsor, click up. How would you, what would it be worth to you? If you could save a day a week, you know, like get it back. Like instead of a five day week, you'd have a four day week. That'd be, that'd be pretty darn good. Wouldn't it you'd love that. Wouldn't you? Well, I can tell you how you can do that. Guaranteed. With click up more time to cook healthy meals like fried baloney sandwiches, you could work on your, on your novel. You could binge some, you know, good reality TV. I would just sleep <laugh> would, which is take the extra time in sleep. Click up is the productivity platform. That'll save you one day of work a week guaranteed click up actually was created to scratch all the best softwares to scratch an it like's the developer said, wait a minute, I need this.

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
I I'm gonna write it. And of course it grew from there. It began with the premise that productivity just simply broken too many tools. You know, too many apps to launch too many tabs in your browser, too many things in entirely separate ecosystems. There has to be a better way to get through the daily hustle. And that's click up. Click up is the one tool to house, all your tasks, all your projects, your docs, your goals, your spreadsheets, and more it's click up is for teams of course, but the team could be you just you, one person thousand plus person doesn't matter and click up. I like this because he comes outta the box ready to go, but you can also customize it for the job you're doing. And then have a di there are many, many customization options. So in fact, features and customization, customization options, no other tool has.

Leo Laporte (00:42:03):
So you can just make it exactly the way you want, whether you're in project management, in engineering, in sales and marketing in HR, whatever you do click up has easy to use solutions that create a more efficient work environment. Now you might say, well, I, you know, okay, does anybody use this? Yeah. 800,000 highly productive teams use click up today. That's like saving 800,000 days a week. That's impressive. Right? Use the code windows to get 15% off. Click ups, massive unlimited plan for not just for the first month, but for the whole year. That's a great way to do this. You could start reclaiming your time for under $5 a month. Right now, click up.com. Use the code windows don't delay. This offer will not last long, 15% off. Click up massive unlimited plan for the whole first year. Click up.com and don't forget the offer code windows cuz that's how you tell them you heard it here. And that benefits Paul and Mary Jo click up. Thank you. Click up. When you laughing, you're laughing at my click up. Click up, click up. <Laugh> new build heads to the dev channel.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:19):
Yeah. That one's not too exciting. So it's all bug fixes, right?

Leo Laporte (00:43:24):
Are you saying what has preceded? This is exciting. Is that what you're saying?

Paul Thurrott (00:43:28):
Hey, we had a, we had an engrossing conversation.

Leo Laporte (00:43:31):
Oh widgets. Yeah, we did.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:33):
There are two app updates going out to dev

Leo Laporte (00:43:35):
Channel.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:36):
One thing though.

Leo Laporte (00:43:37):
There's one thing you should care about in this. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:39):
What's that

Leo Laporte (00:43:41):
Linux? The store thing. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:43:43):
Oh no. See, I actually let me get to that cuz I'm I'm this one. Oh, okay. I don't even, I don't even get it. So there are two app store update. I'm sorry. There are two app updates. Neither of which make any sense to me. <Laugh> so the first is to the well I'd love. I'd love. Listen, I, I write books about windows and I don't even know what this app is for. Okay. There's a, there's a, there's a camera app. Okay. Yeah. And some computers have privacy shields on their webcams. Yes. Either manual or electronic. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and now it will pop up a little thing. This says, Hey, no one can see you because of your privacy.

Leo Laporte (00:44:15):
Well don't you know that cuz it's black.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:18):
Yeah. Well I would think so, but who, what do you use the camera app? For? What, what, what exactly are you doing with it? If, if the, the, the privacy shutter is on the camera that looks at you. Yeah. Some computers still have like the, the world facing camera, but although by the way, you don't see those anymore. So what do we use in the webcam? For what exactly is the

Leo Laporte (00:44:38):
Camera? Yeah, I see there's an app called camera,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:40):
But why? Like, what would you use this for? I guess you could make a little vis yourself or

Leo Laporte (00:44:45):
Something. Yeah. Selfies

Paul Thurrott (00:44:46):
On a, on a computer.

Leo Laporte (00:44:47):
You know what I use it for? Cause it come apple has for you shipped something called photo booth, which is just a dumb thing you give to kids that lets 'em do fancy crazy photos, but I always use it to test my camera <laugh> right, right, right. That's what, that's what this is for.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:03):
Yeah. All right. Well, this is, is about as exciting as the video player app or whatever the video player it's like. I, I, okay. I, I get that it's in windows, but

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
It's easy to write. They wrote it in three minutes. It was very simple, you know?

Paul Thurrott (00:45:14):
Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:45:15):
It does have though, I'm noting on this. Maybe this is again, the mobile ation of, of the desktop is

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:20):
That's what I was thinking.

Leo Laporte (00:45:21):
But I see also an icon for flipping the camera around, like you have a front facing camera.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:27):
Well, right. And, and does

Leo Laporte (00:45:28):
Any laptop have front facing

Paul Thurrott (00:45:30):
Camera? They, I was, yeah they did. And now you, they don't. So this used to be a thing, especially on two, in one computers, we could flip the lid around mm-hmm <affirmative> but the, the world facing cameras, remember Microsoft went on their little 3d thing for three or four years there in windows 10. You could use those cameras to scan in a 3d object and then use it in 3d paint or whatever you're doing in 3d mm-hmm <affirmative> and that that's all gone. You really don't see those anymore. Yeah. So I don't the, the camera app.

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:57):
There are people on, I don't know. There are people on discord saying they use the camera app to test the camera before they do a zoom or

Leo Laporte (00:46:02):
A team. Yeah. That's what we just said. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:04):
Yeah, yeah. That's what that's.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:06):
So in, in

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:07):
Other words, person saying this, so a lot

Paul Thurrott (00:46:08):
Of people it's the internet Explorer of cameras. Yeah. You use it to, to, I use, I use the browser to download Chrome. You use camera to test your camera before you actually use it with an app. You wanna use it. Okay. Perfect. Great. Sounds like a great app. It definitely update. Update that for sure. <Laugh> so the, the like what? Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:46:26):
Excellent.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:27):
Excellent. The store app. The store app. The store app. Yeah. The store app actually update the hotel. Let me try that in English. The store app update makes no sense to me.

Leo Laporte (00:46:37):
So what did they do with that?

Paul Thurrott (00:46:38):
It says, it says, first of all, you can view app screenshots from search results. Okay, great. That's fine. Not a big deal. It says the ability to install games directly from the store without having to switch apps. What does that mean? What does that, what does it, what, what does that mean? Where am I? You're getting a

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:58):
GA. Yeah. Wait a minute. If you're getting a game, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:47:02):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:03):
From what? How do you do it now? Can you go through the store?

Leo Laporte (00:47:06):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:06):
Can you open the store? That's

Leo Laporte (00:47:07):
What it is. And you, so let's say you've got Linux for windows, the Linux subsystem open, and you wanna download a new Lennox. You could probably just do it without exiting the, you don't have to open the store. Just say, I want that games sometimes they'll do that. They put D DLC in the store. In fact my my my alien wear has apps in the store.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:32):
All right. So I'm sorry. I, I just, I'm just parsing a sentence here. I don't understand the, the English of this. I, I can install games directly from the store. Period. Makes sense. I can do that right now. Yes. Then it says without having to switch apps

Leo Laporte (00:47:44):
Yes. Without having to going in the store, where, where are you? You're in the game.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:48):
<Laugh> what does that even mean? Instead of using, using the

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:50):
Xbox app? Doesn't that, isn't that what it means instead of using the Xbox app?

Paul Thurrott (00:47:54):
It doesn't, but it doesn't say the Xbox app. That's my point. I don't understand where I am, where I don't have to switch app. In other words, I can download something from the store without having to switch apps to the store or from the store. What

Leo Laporte (00:48:05):
Is it? To the store and where, so, so is it not the case that some apps will be, some games will be offered DLC or something in the store? And they'll say it's in, in the store. Don't

Paul Thurrott (00:48:18):
About that. That seems like that would be in the game. But

Leo Laporte (00:48:21):
No, I thinks happened to me where you're in

Paul Thurrott (00:48:23):
That I'm out in the world and I'm like, I would like to download a game from the store, but you know what? I don't wanna do switch to the store.

Leo Laporte (00:48:31):
What?

Paul Thurrott (00:48:32):
Oh, what is this?

Leo Laporte (00:48:33):
Oh, oh, oh, I got it. You're in the beautiful Microsoft edge browser. You're on the stray website. Ready to download that fabulous game. Well, strays, not in the store, but something that's in the store. Okay. Yep. Fair enough. Hitman. And it says, wanna install it. You say, yes, you press the button instead of launching the store, which is confusing. It just downloads it.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:53):
I love it. By the way, you know, the sentence that would've made, that made sense without having to switch from the web browser reviewing

Leo Laporte (00:48:58):
Current. But it's not just a web browser could be other things to, well,

Paul Thurrott (00:49:01):
Where else would you see this?

Leo Laporte (00:49:02):
I, another app in apps that I, I have to think there are apps like, okay, I got another one, a photo editing app. Mm-Hmm that offers in the store filters. You're in the photo editing app. It says, do you want our additional filters? You say yes. Now it's confusing for the user. Suddenly you're in the Microsoft. It says

Paul Thurrott (00:49:18):
Store games. It literally specifically says games, but then it doesn't say where you are, where you might have to switch apps. I, it, I'm saying this is poorly written. This kind of goes back to the communications thing that we keep

Leo Laporte (00:49:31):
Talking about. It's not well written. It's not clear.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:33):
It's not clear where I am. Well, I'm gonna be in a place where I, I, I, I could down, I, I wanna download a game. And it's not making me switch to the store up to download the game. It's gonna download from the store. I would imagine in the background, I have to imagine that cuz it, well, no, it does say that. I guess I just don't understand where I

Leo Laporte (00:49:51):
Would be. This is the least of the problems in the Microsoft store.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:56):
I I'm not, well, I'm not saying it's a big problem. What I'm saying is both of these app updates to me didn't make sense and they still don't

Leo Laporte (00:50:05):
Make sense. So I'll give you an example that really bugged the hell out me. I like when I install windows to install the Bing wallpaper, right? Cause then I get a new wallpaper every day. So I go to the store and I search literally Bing wallpaper. Now you would think Microsoft which owns Bing wallpaper and gives it away free would stop the daily wallpaper from Bing for a buck 49 app.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:28):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:29):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:50:30):
Why is that's true? Oh, it says this app is a better alternative to the classic Microsoft Bing desktop. <Laugh> wow.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:38):
<Laugh> it's better for the

Leo Laporte (00:50:39):
Author. It's better for the author and then it has, and then it, and oh, this is really ridiculous. And then it says it has the following features not found in the original one. And then it has just a button that says personalization.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:54):
Okay. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:50:55):
<Laugh> by the way, it's got six ratings, all one star because it's a buck 49 for something Microsoft gives you for free. But why does Microsoft allow that in their store as one of the top search results for Bing wallpaper?

Paul Thurrott (00:51:12):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:51:12):
That's wrong? Yeah. In fact, none of the top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12 results are the actual Bing wallpaper. <Laugh> well, number 12 is the edge browser. That's the first Microsoft app.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:30):
Interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
Bing fan favorites, landscapes, lively wallpaper, daily lock, screen and wallpaper. But the Bing wallpaper. Nope. In fact, I guess this is not where you get it.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:43):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:51:45):
Anyway, that always drives me crazy. I always forget. Yeah, totally.

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:48):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:49):
Yeah. The, the store is another example of an app that has legitimately improved a lot over the years, but it is, it's still dogged by its low quality beginnings. 

Leo Laporte (00:51:59):
Yeah. And they, yeah. You know, I mean, and I understand these things are so big that, that they, you know, they're not enough people to hire to fix it. Yeah. But

Paul Thurrott (00:52:07):
They have 185,000 employees. I mean throw two or three people at it at least. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:12):
<Laugh> yeah, they do.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:15):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:52:15):
All right. Moving right along as the eternal spring continues here, Microsoft shuts down windows, insider enterprise test bed. Now where you gonna take a nap?

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:28):
Exactly. Well <laugh> well there was this thing they had called the Olympia Corp. I don't know if anybody listening remembers this, but they set up a site for enterprises who wanted to test enterprise features of windows 10 before they actually started implementing them. And they could run it in this kind of like windows, insider enterprise lab. So that's what the first name of it was. And they, then they changed the name to Olympia Corp. So this was back in like 20 17, 20 18. Right. I have no idea how many people ever used this or didn't use it. But this week they started sending out notes to people and saying, Hey, we're shutting this down. And get all your stuff out of it quickly if you have anything in there, because we're gonna shut it down on September 12th. So when I contacted Microsoft about this and I said, so what's why, why are you guys doing this? And, and is, does this have any implications for what you're doing with the windows insider for business program? You know what they said? Paul can guess this.

Leo Laporte (00:53:34):
Did they say tomorrow belongs to those who embrace it today?

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:37):
No, that's our

Leo Laporte (00:53:38):
Tag said, did we announce something like that? We, we didn't even know this was happening.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:41):
No, even better. We have nothing to share at this time.

Leo Laporte (00:53:45):
Of course they did.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:46):
<Laugh> I'm like, you're sending this note out to companies like <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:53:51):
We have nothing to share.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:53):
I'm like, no. So I'm not asking to share anything. Like you're already sharing this right. When you're telling people it's shutting down

Leo Laporte (00:53:59):
<Laugh> we don't know why.

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:00):
No. So I, one, one of my the person who tipped me to this originally who I named in my article said, you know, I just, I, I wonder if it's because they're doing a lot of other new programs to do simulations for windows 11 and yes, this past year they've been introducing a lot of new programs to try to get businesses, to try out windows 11. They have this thing that shows you how similar windows 11 is to windows 10. And then there's these onboarding simulations, all kinds of things like that. They could have said that they could have said we have all these new, better things. Right. But they didn't say that. It could be because no one's using it. That's my guess. My guess is no one's using it.

Leo Laporte (00:54:37):
<Laugh> I wanna get one of those staples buttons, you know, that was easy button. And I can, you can reprogram them to say, we have nothing to share

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:45):
This at this time. <Laugh> I just asked for a comment on something else this afternoon. I'm like, and the one answer you are not allowed to give me is we have nothing to share that. Any, any other answer is good? Not that answer.

Leo Laporte (00:54:58):
<Laugh> no comment. Sounds like you're guilty of something I plead the

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:03):
Share. Sounds like, yeah. Okay. I'm not asking you to share. Just gimme an answer. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:55:08):
<Laugh> well, the implication is, well, we know, but we're not gonna tell you

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:11):
Exactly. Yeah. Right. And at this time is even more like unnerving. Cause you're like, oh, so you're gonna share later.

Leo Laporte (00:55:18):
It's kind of withholding, right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:19):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I don't know. I wouldn't be too alarmist about them shutting this down, but it's also distressing that they aren't saying why. Just say no one used it. It's fine. Like that's good. That's fine.

Leo Laporte (00:55:32):
Whatever. Now, can we talk about the new look?

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:35):
Yeah. New sitting at re refresh

Leo Laporte (00:55:37):
Today. I just noticed this very pretty.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:39):
Yes. How can you not notice it? It's

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
Line green tomorrow belongs to those who embrace it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:46):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:55:47):
It's not

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:48):
A lot of blocky fonts. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:55:52):
ZD net. I mean, sorry. CNET did the same kind of they did. And I guess this is, you know, this is all yeah. You're in the family still. Yes

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:01):
We are. Yeah. Yes we are.

Leo Laporte (00:56:02):
I like though the picture you very nice. And I I've never known that you did that picture me. I do Chris. Marwar right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:12):
Aunt.

Leo Laporte (00:56:12):
Oh, aunt did aunt that picture. It's in the studio. Yeah. Yep. And it says you're a senior contributing editor. I should add that to your lower third. I didn't, I didn't know. That was your

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:22):
Title, title, SMI

Leo Laporte (00:56:24):
<Laugh>. But I do like, I mean, it's a very, it's nice, clear, clean layout. I have to say. It's

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:28):
Very clean. Yeah. It

Leo Laporte (00:56:29):
Is this. I do like the font. They're going modern.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:32):
Yeah. They're going modern. We get rid of the red. We left the red for windows weekly and we went away from red. Isn't

Leo Laporte (00:56:38):
That hysterical. Do you think that's because of us?

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:41):
Definitely. No, I have not.

Leo Laporte (00:56:44):
Are you still owned by red ventures though? Yes. Are you, did they sell you to lime green ventures?

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:49):
They did not. <Laugh> okay. At least as far as I know,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:52):
It's wasn't there a lime green like bike rental company. Yeah. Lime

Leo Laporte (00:56:55):
Company. They went out, I hate to say it, but they went bankruptcies. They went outta

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:58):
Business. Right. Let's hope we're not going to cause we're

Leo Laporte (00:57:00):
Using the no, no, no. I like, you know what? I actually, I like this a little bit better than I like the CNET redesign. I think this is pretty nice. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:07):
Yeah. You know what? It's a new look. It's a it's they've changed. Since we got bought by red ventures, they've kind of changed how they're focusing ZD net and they're trying to show it's a new day.

Leo Laporte (00:57:17):
Right. So, okay. This is nitpicking

Paul Thurrott (00:57:22):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Wow. Is it the logo

Leo Laporte (00:57:24):
Tomorrow belongs to those who embrace it today? I like the idea, but it's a little reminiscent of the Nazi song tomorrow belongs to me.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:32):
You

Leo Laporte (00:57:33):
<Laugh>, I'm just

Paul Thurrott (00:57:35):
Not what we were shooting for.

Leo Laporte (00:57:36):
I'm just gonna mention that. Do with it, what you want. I know you're not responsible for it. I am not. No.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:42):
Ah, geez. It's what was the other one? Work will set you free. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:46):
<Laugh> when you by the way,

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:49):
He is empowering people to blah, blah, blah, borrow from Microsoft. We could do that.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:53):
Yeah. There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:57:55):
The only reason I know this is cuz in the movie cabaret mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the, the, the little Arian guy sings this song and they all stare in the beer garden. They all start singing this. And so when I hear tomorrow belongs to, I think, I think of that.

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:11):
All right. You gotta tell Jason Heiner he's our EIC. So,

Leo Laporte (00:58:15):
So actually I don't think actually I'm gonna take it back, I guess. It's not historically. Okay. Wikipedia says actually the Nazis did not sing. It. It is, it is from the Broadway music cabaret from cab. Okay. Okay. It was written by candor and ebb actually. <Laugh> so ne nevermind. It's okay. It's okay. It's it's from cabaret.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:39):
So yes.

Leo Laporte (00:58:41):
Okay. Anyway, moving right along. I didn't mean to rain parade, but

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:45):
No, it's good. I think it's good that

Leo Laporte (00:58:47):
I like the redesign. I do. I do really like the redesign.

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:50):
I've already gotten a lot of hate mail about the

Leo Laporte (00:58:52):
Redesign. No, I disagree. You

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:53):
Know what? It'll be fine.

Leo Laporte (00:58:54):
I was not crazy about CNET. I think this is much nicer.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:58):
I, I I made the comparison to Pentium with her earlier where I, you know, it's jarring and it's new, it's unfamiliar. And then in a little while, like, oh, it's

Leo Laporte (00:59:07):
Fine. But I, you know what? I really like the breadcrumbs. So this slash that you're doing is actually makes sense, because you can use the breadcrumbs to go to different parts of the mm-hmm <affirmative> site. I think that's actually very clever. I like that. It is mm-hmm

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:21):
<Affirmative> yeah, no, I like, I like the design. I think, I think it was way overdue time for SV net to get a new design <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:59:27):
Yeah, I agree.

Leo Laporte (00:59:28):
Oh, oh, Jason Heiner. God bless you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like, he's like editor in chief now. Huh? He is he's good. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> good, man. Really, really good. That's right. I think I, I talked about that one with him when he took, when he got that job. Yeah. All right. Let's do a Microsoft 365 segment because the world

Paul Thurrott (00:59:50):
Is well, speaking of redesigns, Leo. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:59:53):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:54):
If you ever wanna see community of people react violently to the smallest change imaginable, then I will point you to the coming update, to I'll look for the desktop <laugh>, which is, it's such a goofy thing to have to even try to explain this, but I'll look as a multi pain experience. So to speak this navigation bar, there's like the, you know, if you're looking at mail anyway you know, the list of your emails will be in there. And then the reading view on the side, and there are these things on the slides as well, you know, you can get to different parts of outlook. So <laugh> to date. If you wanted to get to the calendar, the contacts with other modules, a little bar at the bottom, but they're moving it to the side because they want outlook to be consistent with the other versions of outlook of which there are many it's logical that's fair.

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:40):
Yep. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:42):
Everyone who uses outlook hates that <laugh> oh, and it may literally be everyone. Oh,

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:47):
It's a change. People let people hate it. Like it's just cuz it's a change. Right. That's why, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:53):
That's it. Outlook is a lot like windows 11 where it's this really complex thing underneath and they're trying to make it look simpler and there a little prettier and you know, they've been doing this for a few years now. It looks honestly, it looks okay to my eyes. It it's, but it's this really big complex beast of an application. I, I don't know. <Laugh> if I, if I were to write something like the outlook field guide, for example, I would probably advise people that there's a keyboard shortcut you can use to get to those components modules or whatever they're called and maybe just don't worry about where they are on the screen, but you know yeah. I don't use outlook, so,

Leo Laporte (01:01:31):
Huh,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:33):
Weird. Huh? People are freaking out.

Leo Laporte (01:01:37):
Yeah. Yeah. Well again, this is any change that's what's gonna happen.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:41):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yep.

Leo Laporte (01:01:44):
It's just normal.

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:46):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:47):
And I don't have a link to this next one, but I wanted to ask Mary Jo, especially cuz you would receive these kinds of support calls on TWiTtter. But have you been hearing lately from people who are seeing ads and outlook mobile?

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:57):
Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:58):
So here's the thing <laugh> this is not, this is not a new feature. Ads have been an outlook mobile for, I think a year or two now. But what I, I just today I had someone give me a little bit of maybe insight into this. Cuz someone emailed me and said, Hey, I'm seeing ads. What's going on? Like this is terrible. And I said, well, you shouldn't be seeing ads. If you pay for a Microsoft 365 account, the ads are for people who don't pay. And then he looked at his app and he said, oh, he goes, that's interesting. I guess I got signed out and he signed in and the ad went away. Oh, oh though. I don't know. Yeah. So I'm curious if you,

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:35):
I realize that I didn't know that. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:37):
Yeah. So I, I looked it up. I, I had a story. I wanna say it was a year and a half ago-ish or someone had a story on my side of it. It was either me or someone else. But about this topic that Microsoft admitted, they were gonna be adding ads to Och make ad supported if you, you know, if you don't pay for the account and yeah. I don't know. I guess it's reasonably acceptable, but I, but I feel like I've seen a lot of complaints about this lately on TWiTtter.

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:03):
I think there's more ads being introduced in more places now. Like I think I forget somebody showed me Excel online. I believe like the web version.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:12):
Oh, with ads in it really?

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:13):
Yeah. There was a tiny ad like in between the oh

Paul Thurrott (01:03:17):
The yes. Yes

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:18):
Sobar and you know, it was squished in just like small words. The thing that's driving people the most crazy is they already own a product that Microsoft has and then they show 'em an ad for it. Yeah. And they

Paul Thurrott (01:03:28):
Like, that's another, you

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:29):
Know, these guys have AI, right? Like why don't they know I'm running office 365 and they're showing me an ad for office 365. Right. That's what people are getting mad about.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:38):
I send feedback to Google every single day because I use Google news. And I'd like to know why a story about botany is in the technology section and with all your AI prowess, how could you possibly not know this? Isn't a technology story. Well

Leo Laporte (01:03:50):
It's science or

Paul Thurrott (01:03:51):
What. Okay. But <laugh> this is

Leo Laporte (01:03:53):
A science. No. If they had the, if they had smuggled chubs of baloney in there, that would be a problem.

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:58):
Maybe be a little more

Paul Thurrott (01:03:59):
Question there. Find digital tools that will help you better smuggle CHUs from Mexico.

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:03):
Yeah. People are, people are just seeing ads more. I feel like. And like I think somebody shared with you and I on TWiTtter, a startup screen on windows 11 that had a huge Xbox ad on it. Didn't you, were you on that thread where the guy was just like, this is a no, that's not good. This is an absolute no. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:23):
<Laugh> that's no, Microsoft is, Microsoft will not call these ads by the way. Right. These are suggestions or there's some other term. Yeah. Suggestions. I think the thing in Excel you were talking about is probably called an information bar. Right. They, they will argue that they want you to get more value out of the product you're using.

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:38):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:39):
I will argue that you, if you're gonna do something like this to someone who's paying for that product, cuz I see those ads as well, sometimes in office you need to give me an explicit way out, you know? Yeah. I don't ever wanna see this thing again and I don't ever wanna see this thing again ever. But yeah, so I, these are, those little was used

Leo Laporte (01:04:58):
Thin,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:59):
Normally yellow bars, thin

Leo Laporte (01:05:00):
Light yellow bars, but the Xbox one was big.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:03):
It was full screen. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:05:05):
Yeah. That's not.

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:06):
It was like sign up for Xbox blah, blah, blah. Hey look like

Paul Thurrott (01:05:10):
Even folks, even apple is gonna get more into advertising. This is seen as the way of the future. When everyone moving to subscriptions, we're trying to figure out this, how do we make money on, well, not everyone with, with all companies moving these subscriptions, how do we make money from people who aren't

Leo Laporte (01:05:26):
Subscribed,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:27):
Right. Paying and, and we're doing the same way we do it on the web, which is to use ads. And mm-hmm <affirmative> if you've ever used, like I'll look do com for example, and you don't pay for Microsoft 365 account that thing's full of ads, you know, it's terrible. Yep. And I, I do pay, so I don't really see these things, but every once in a while, when I use a secondary account, maybe for the book or something, I'll bring up outlook.com, especially. And you're like, what does, what is this thing? Like, do people actually use this? 

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:49):
No. You know what, if you run an ad blocker and you bring up outlook.com, you might only see one

Leo Laporte (01:05:55):
Ad. I bet it doesn't block the ads cuz it's first party and it doesn't, it's not can ads

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:00):
Thinks fewer ads. I

Paul Thurrott (01:06:01):
Think I that's. Right. You can implement a when I do

Leo Laporte (01:06:03):
It. Yeah. So if you ads server your block, it yeah. I mean, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:07):
But you can make it look like part of the UI if you're, if you own it, right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:10):
For sure. Yep. Okay. I understand why you'd put an ad in a web, in a free web product. I mean, that's not me too.

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:17):
That doesn't surprise me. I think you just have to accept that. Like you're getting it for free, so you get an ad. Okay. But when you're paying for something and then you get an ad for the product you're paying for, that's a little different,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:28):
Big problem. Yeah. Yep. I agree. Yeah. I agree.

Leo Laporte (01:06:33):
All right. Let's take a little break and then we're gonna talk, oh, developers, developers, developers. Oh yeah. In just a little bit so excited. You know how much I love developers mobile and yes, there's an Xbox bit. And there's the back of the book too. There's lots of stuff still to come. We're just getting started here. All you dozers, you hang in there as we talk a little bit about our sponsor for this segment of windows weekly in fr scale, in for scale I don't have to tell you the statistics for ransomware attacks are alarming would be an understatement. Terrifying. If you run a business as I do, you're running scared. I mean, every time I come into work, I say, aren't we safe? What are we doing? According to beta news.com cybercriminals have the capability of penetrating up to 93% of company networks it with social engineering, of course, and, and exploits and you know, fishing.

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Paul Thurrott (01:11:54):
Jo. I can't say the term dev box without seeing the term Don box and I think is dev box

Leo Laporte (01:11:59):
Box's brother. It is. I take it. Don box was a old Microsoft E mm-hmm <affirmative> back in the day. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:06):
Who now works for meta.

Leo Laporte (01:12:09):
Yeah. So I remember when they asked dev box, which was a little confused about at build. So now you get it small box. Well, yeah, it's cause there's no box. It's like, what is this thing?

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:18):
It's in public preview now. Right? So you can kick the tires if you wanna see if this would work for you. So dev box is a preconfigured developer workstation in the cloud. It runs on top of Azure, virtual desktop. So there are all different sizes depending on the kind of job that you're gonna work on. Four virtual CPUs up to 32 virtual CPUs. You get storage, you get compute and then they also have a dev box storage SS D SKU as well. If you use windows 365, the Microsoft cloud PC service to manage your PCs, you can also use that to manage dev box. And the idea is you would use dev box in the cloud. Instead of taking the time to set up your own developer, workstation you'd go and it would be ready for you. All preconfigured set windows subsystem for Linux is on it. Android subsystem for Linux is on it. You can just use it and start building your app without having to take the time to first do set up all your infrastructure. So yeah, I, I think people are interested and they're like, yeah, that sounds good. But how much is it gonna cost? We don't know that's

Paul Thurrott (01:13:28):
The that's gonna be

Leo Laporte (01:13:29):
The key.

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:30):
I know. So, and they also are not saying when it will be available to the mainstream, but during the test period, they're giving you a set number of hours to try it for free. And then if you go beyond that, you do have to pay, even though it's in public preview. Yeah. If you're interested, you can test it. Now Paul should test this. I think you should test this. You're a

Paul Thurrott (01:13:51):
Dick. I will. I, I mean, I, I use visual studio for very specific things. It's I don't know. It, it looks like they support all or at least most of the workloads that you would get if you installed this thing locally and yep. Yeah. I, I guess, I don't know. I'm trying to understand the appeal of this. 

Leo Laporte (01:14:14):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah, I am too. Cause I mean, if you're a developer, you have hardware.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:19):
Yeah. Yeah. But maybe that's the point. So hardware, some GP hardware especially is hard to get and is expensive. Not anymore. Maybe this is like, by the way that that was

Leo Laporte (01:14:27):
True during build it's completely reversed now. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:31):
Yeah. I mean, I, in the same sense that you could take a pretty basic laptop and turn it into a gaming machine with the clouds gaming service, I guess you could do that with visual studio here maybe

Leo Laporte (01:14:41):
Is, is maybe this more for building web apps and SAS applications as it. No,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:47):
It's the whole, it's the whole list of, is there any kind you could, you could, you could build windows, desktop apps with us if you wanted to.

Leo Laporte (01:14:54):
I, well, I, who knows I'm I'm not a developer, but boy, if I want to. Yeah. And I'm sure Paul, you feel the same way if I'm gonna code, I'm gonna sit down at an actual machine.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:02):
Yep. Oh yeah. No, I'd like to code, but could I have a little latency every time I type? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:07):
Is it for pair programming more or, I mean, is it, is it no,

Mary Jo Foley (01:15:11):
No. <Laugh> I think, I think, I feel like they, there are some things that programmers are doing now where the hardware is really expensive to get.

Leo Laporte (01:15:18):
Right. That must be it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:15:20):
That must be, you know, like say, say you wanna create an AI or an ML type app. Right. And you're like, yeah, but I'm gonna need this hardware and I'm gonna need this much compute this much storage. This will just be like, yeah, spin it up in the cloud and use it. That's that's kind of how I think about it. Maybe that's not yeah. The way I don't know,

Paul Thurrott (01:15:36):
But I'm gonna, I, yeah. I'm gonna take a look at it. I'm I'm curious about it, but yeah. I'd like, like Leo said, you want hardware, you

Leo Laporte (01:15:42):
Know? Right. I mean, there is, you wanna get like a, there's a very popular site called re it where you can use any language it's this cloud. But I think it's mostly for pair programming and yeah. You know, collaboration and that kind of thing as opposed to

Paul Thurrott (01:15:57):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:15:58):
A team. I don't, I just, Microsoft must know there's an audience for

Paul Thurrott (01:16:02):
Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, you're, you're a developer, are you telling me the hard part of being a developer is configuring a computer? No. You know, like this seems like kind of a weird, I don't know. I guess if you use lots of different environments yeah, yeah. Multi, this is

Mary Jo Foley (01:16:15):
Meant to be any programming framework, any IDE like you can use it

Leo Laporte (01:16:19):
However you, oh, I guess yeah. You might have a bunch of them that makes sense. Maybe you've got, you know, a react machine and you know, you've got, yeah. That maybe that's it, you know, a.net machine, right? Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:16:28):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:16:29):
Yeah. I guess that would be useful.

Mary Jo Foley (01:16:32):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:16:32):
And, and, you know, I have to say installing environments on a machine to do development can really screw up a machine. So I kind of understand that as well, like right. You set it all up to do this, and then you got 18 different. I

Paul Thurrott (01:16:47):
Just feel this would solve a problem for me because I use so many different laptops because I review laptops and you always forget something. Right. You know, or you forget some configuration, but I, I don't think that's the case for most actual developers. Right. <laugh> I mean, you kind of set this thing up exactly the way you want it. And then you're good for probably a couple years. I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting. We'll

Leo Laporte (01:17:08):
See. We'll see how it goes.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:09):
Yeah. Everything's going to the cloud.

Leo Laporte (01:17:12):
It's funny. Cuz I'm the one who said that's the future, right? That the PCs are to the cloud dead go, you know, you're gonna be running windows in the cloud and all that. Yeah. The last thing I thought that would happen is to developers. I understand if you're doing machine, you know, if you're doing training, the huge data sets and mm-hmm <affirmative> and all this these actually don't have a huge amount of storage, which is weird. Yeah. Much less than you would get at home. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:38):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:17:40):
So I don't really understand it.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:42):
I'm a little nervous about a future where we have developers who are advanced in some language, in some environment, some framework, whatever it is and have no idea how to configure a computer to use those things like, right. That's not good.

Leo Laporte (01:17:54):
Is this where we're

Paul Thurrott (01:17:55):
Is this where we're heading? I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:17:57):
Right. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:17:57):
That's interesting,

Leo Laporte (01:18:00):
Fascinating, fascinating rhythm, but da, da just remember tomorrow belongs to me. Okay. That's right. Yeah. Baby. And my Chubbs, Microsoft and canonical are bringing native.net to Buntu. I saw this announcement. I thought that was cool. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:19):
It is cool. And they, they also have kind of a fun little life cycle alignment where.net long term servicing versions of.net are released every other November. So this year will be.net seven, which is not an LTS release next November will be an LTS release and then Ubuntu ships, their LTS versions, the following April every year as well. So they kind of line up and that way they can ensure that each version of Ubuntu LTS will ship with the, the long term supported version of net as well. So it's the, SSTK the runtime asp.net accord. It's available in some, you probably know what this is. I don't chiseled Ubuntu containers, which I

Leo Laporte (01:18:59):
Understand are <laugh> I have no idea.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:01):
Okay. Small footprint containers.

Leo Laporte (01:19:02):
Oh, I thought was just one with a good jaw line, but I guess,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:05):
Yeah, I I'm sure it's that too, but I think the thing that's neat about this is that they work together canonical and Microsoft to make this happen. They've

Leo Laporte (01:19:12):
Yeah. That's great.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:13):
Several month long project.

Leo Laporte (01:19:15):
Oh, you'd never, you know, Linux is a cancer. Steve Balmer said, yeah. You'd never come a long way, baby. Yeah, we sure have. It's great. I mean, it's really good. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:22):
Because these guys, these two companies are actually now sharing their security problem information with each other to ensure that if things are found on Ubuntu, it gets its way back to do net six and vice versa as quickly as possible. Yeah. So they've really kind of streamlined that process. I, that that's rather astonishing to me. So mm-hmm, <affirmative> it's a brave new world

Leo Laporte (01:19:43):
For sure. Right there. Yeah. It's cool. It's very, very cool. Yeah. I have to say, yeah, it's neat.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:49):
And then Mary Jo forwarded this to me today because she knows I'm a, a markdown language fanboy of sorts. Microsoft, if you're familiar with visual studio code, you know, that it supports markdown and you can install various extensions that make it better for, you know, different use cases. Someone at Microsoft got the idea and said that, Hey, maybe we should make a, a markdown language server so we could take everything we've done in vs code all of the tool, not just the, you know, language support and syntax highlighting, but actual all the tooling, the things that add, you know, support for like document outlines, workplace symbols, smart, selectors, completions, et cetera, et cetera, just make it available to the world and we'll open source it. And so I don't know that this will be the primary use case, but, and they, but they do say this explicitly, if you wanna write your own editor that supports markdown, you can just use this and you'll get a hundred percent of what is in visual studio code for free and also other markdown tools. So interesting. So I, I'm gonna look at this. I, I, I did look at this briefly today and I, I don't know how I would use this myself, but the idea of making a, an ed like a lightweight editor that's was not plain text, but was marked down, is super interesting to me because I still struggle to find good tools that I want to use on windows. So that's interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:21:15):
You moving to a Buntu?

Paul Thurrott (01:21:19):
No, no. I'm gonna do that on windows.

Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:21:22):
Excuse me.

Leo Laporte (01:21:25):
Alright. Let's do a little mobile stuff now.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:27):
Yeah. Just real quick. A couple of Android related things happened this week. I'm curious, Mary Jo, because Android 13 is available now on pixels. Did you, are you gonna update your phone to Andrew 13?

Leo Laporte (01:21:41):
Me? yeah. Yeah, he should, but it's yeah. Yeah. Why not? It's it's not available. Officially yet. It's still public,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:49):
Right?

Leo Laporte (01:21:50):
It's out. No, no,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:50):
This is no, this is yeah. For mainstream. Not for beta. Yeah. Sur surprise. No, it's out of beta. That's the thing only on pixels.

Leo Laporte (01:21:57):
Oh. Oh.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:59):
So it will head out to the rest of the world later.

Leo Laporte (01:22:02):
Yeah. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:22:03):
This is about a month earlier than

Leo Laporte (01:22:04):
Expected. Yeah. Usually they do with, you know, con commitment with the announcement of the next phone that pixel seven, but not in this case. Huh. You know, they were very VAD far along in the public beta, you know, the developer beta and public beta. Yeah. They were, I think beta six was out. So they must feel pretty. I didn't have it yet. I don't have it yet. The good news is I'm hearing very good things about it with battery life performance mm-hmm <affirmative> nice. So I think if you have a pixel yeah. Wow. I left mine at home today. What a stupid day to leave mine at home. Darn it. Mine says it's up to date it won't. Yeah, you haven't got it yet, but they're pushing it out. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:22:41):
I think it, I was, I was on the beta and I did get it on both of the pixels I have. 

Leo Laporte (01:22:46):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:47):
I was already using it

Leo Laporte (01:22:48):
Really. So starting today doesn't mean everybody's gonna get it all onwards, I guess. Right. True.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:52):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I, from a usability perspective, I think the big thing or the, well, the big thing you'll notice, well maybe Mary Jo actually is that material you themeing it now extends the third party icons if you want it to. And there are, there are in fact, a bunch of those now, which wasn't the case before. So you get more of a, kind of a cohesive looking home, you know, home screen or whatever, but I don't know most for the most part. It's not it's really not that big of an update compared to say iOS 16, which is gonna be a huge update mm-hmm <affirmative> but you know, that's fun. I, I, I think it was just kind of exciting that it happened. Yeah. the other thing that, the other thing I Google for the first time sent me a phone to review. Oh, nice. So I got a pixel six, a yeah. I was actually really excited about that. Cuz I could tell you spending a couple thousand dollars every year on Google phones is not great. What's

Leo Laporte (01:23:43):
Your what's your daily driver right

Paul Thurrott (01:23:45):
Now? It's been this year. It's been an iPhone 13 pro. Okay. 

Leo Laporte (01:23:49):
So those Instagram pictures are iPhone pictures

Paul Thurrott (01:23:51):
Mostly. No I've been used. No, those they're all, those are all pixel six a oh they look good. Yeah. The only exception are the zoomed in photos from the soccer game, but the, the other photos are all six a huh.

Leo Laporte (01:24:01):
Nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:02):
So it's fantastic. And it's a great value. The only thing I would just say kind of as a tip, I, I highly recommend this phone. It's a, you know, four forty nine great price because the pixel seven series is coming out. If, if you're interested in these phones, the pixel six is on sale right now for three, no 4 99. So it's only $50 more. Yeah. Honestly, for wireless charging, faster charging, the better camera system and better IP rating and probably some things I'm missing slightly bigger screen, which I would actually appreciate. I would spend the $50 right now while it's on sale and get that instead. But honestly this is not like previous a series funds because it's not using a, a mid-level processor. So we'll, it will last probably three to five years, depending on how you use it. Plus

Leo Laporte (01:24:46):
You get updates, you're gonna keep those updates going.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:48):
Yeah. I think it's three years of version updates. One of which just came out this week. And five years of security updates

Leo Laporte (01:24:54):
If I remember. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:56):
Good.

Leo Laporte (01:24:56):
This exp you know, I've been looking at your Instagram pictures and especially one of mark, the kind of the portrait of mark and it looked, I thought, boy, that looks really good. Yep. That explains it. It's a pixel six a yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:09):
Yeah, yeah. The thing I love about the pixel that, and actually this is a good example of this not happening because I didn't do it. If you look at the sky behind him, it's all grayed out. Yeah. And the reason it's grayed out is because it's cloudy. If you touch the sky and the viewfinder, a pixel you'll get the perfect cloud delineation or you'll see blue and gray, whatever's up there. I didn't do that here because we were in shadows and I wanted him to be centered. But if you do it with an iPhone, you don't always get that. And it's one of the things I really missed on the iPhone, on the pixel. They do a really good job with that. And and this phone does it too. It's just and that's actually, that's the one photo. I, I noticed it when I posted it. I was like, oh, that's interesting. But I didn't focus on the sky. Obviously I focused on my son, but yeah. Yeah. It's a great, great camera looks good. A great,

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
Great, there's a certain quality, you know, as I look at it, there's just a, it's like a portrait level detail or something that just, you, it shouts pixel for some reason.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:02):
Yeah. There there's a right. So if you use an iPhone, you might know, actually I don't know the term, but there are these modes in the camera where it's called vivid, you know, vivid two, probably whatever. They're I positive vivid is pixel mode

Leo Laporte (01:26:14):
It's built in. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:16):
It's just a little bit extra vivid. It's hyper real vivid is the Samsung almost

Leo Laporte (01:26:20):
Looks Dr. It's just got that.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:22):
It's yeah. It's a little bit of punch and it's, it is actually exactly what I'm looking for.

Leo Laporte (01:26:27):
Yeah. I, it makes it's, they're pleasing. I mean, they're not, you know, maybe a professional wouldn't say, oh yeah, they're perfect. But they have, but it's what you look at on Instagram. You see? And you go, oh, that's good. Yep. I like that. Yeah. It pops. It pops. That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm hungry. So stop posting food pictures. Will you?

Paul Thurrott (01:26:47):
Yeah. The owner of this restaurant, did I tell you the story? His name is Joel, but of course in, in Mexico, you pronounced that PO

Leo Laporte (01:26:53):
Well, ho <laugh>. Oh, well what, and you went, you had some taco pictures. I think you went to that place that somebody feel somebody, somebody feed Phil highlighted. Right? Is that the one?

Paul Thurrott (01:27:07):
Oh, that like, no. Yeah. You're that's no, that's not the place. The place that looks he highlighted is El te Tito was the place that invented the El pastor

Leo Laporte (01:27:15):
Taco. But this is a street taco.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:18):
That's right. This Cocos, this restaurant is smaller than my bathroom.

Leo Laporte (01:27:22):
It looks so good. Yeah. You're driving

Paul Thurrott (01:27:25):
It's right on the street.

Leo Laporte (01:27:26):
Crazy man. So Lisa, believe it or not.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:31):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (01:27:32):
Lisa says, yeah, we're gonna go we're gonna go visit the Theros <laugh>. Wow. All right. She you're welcome. She, I think it's the pictures that have wooed her and she says, yeah, I hear that penthouse above them is still available. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:27:49):
It's not above us. It's across from us.

Leo Laporte (01:27:52):
It's across the street.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:53):
No, across the it's just next door. It's like so

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
We, you wouldn't hear us thumping around at 5:00 AM.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:59):
Not above us. No,

Leo Laporte (01:28:00):
No. Good. Okay. So then we can take the penthouse <laugh> sure. Yeah. It's I'm looking at

Paul Thurrott (01:28:09):
I'm Maio would love to see you.

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
Hello Maio. We will transfer money, one smuggled Chub at a time.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:17):
That's right. Tediously. As, as we did inch

Leo Laporte (01:28:20):
By inch, filling up the coffers until we can buy it. So is your review live on your site now?

Paul Thurrott (01:28:30):
Yes, it is other pixel.

Leo Laporte (01:28:31):
Yeah. Okay. Good. 4 99. I've been telling people I'm glad to hear this. Cause I've been telling people on the radio show that this is probably the mid, mid price phone to get so good. Good, good,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:43):
Good. It is. It's great. It's a great fun. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:47):
And of course the pixel seven coming soon. That's right. Mary Jo, you use Samsung. Yes, no,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:55):
No, no, no. She's pixel

Leo Laporte (01:28:56):
As well. I pixel pro six. Okay. Okay. Pixel six pro I don't like Samsung

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:01):
Because I, I always say to Paul, I feel like they oversaturate the pictures they

Paul Thurrott (01:29:05):
Still do. Do they?

Leo Laporte (01:29:06):
Don't. Yep. I love that. And the, the look of the pixels. Very natural.

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:09):
Yeah. I love the pixel photos. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I also don't like the whole, you have to be in the Samsung ecosystem thing, you know, where like you have to use our ROI services are on top of

Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
All. We can hate that

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:20):
Google services and Microsoft

Leo Laporte (01:29:22):
Services I'm with you a hundred percent.

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:25):
I just like stick with

Paul Thurrott (01:29:26):
The, the duplication stuff is ridiculous.

Leo Laporte (01:29:28):
But I do have to say your phone on windows works best with Samsung. I don't know why, but it just really it's like they design

Paul Thurrott (01:29:34):
It because it's a partnership because Google and Microsoft never been a partner on

Leo Laporte (01:29:38):
Anything. No, it works so well though with my Samsung S 22,

Paul Thurrott (01:29:43):
Those companies do not like each other. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:45):
No. Nope.

Leo Laporte (01:29:47):
All right. I think we've we've procrastinated. We've pro variated. We've perpetuated. And now it's time to do the Xbox yeah. Segment.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:58):
If you're trying to follow a long Leo, I screwed up some of the links in this section, unfortunately. So I won't, I won't click anything wing it here. I apologize.

Leo Laporte (01:30:04):
Just do what you want,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:05):
But we do have a number of of gaming stories that I think are important this week. So the first one is that be thanks. There's a lot of stuff that's been coming out in this legal filing stuff going around on, going on around Microsoft's attempted acquisition of activation blizzard, right? So Microsoft has, you know, put filings in there, go, Sony has Sony would like to prevent this from happening. Microsoft would obviously like this to happen. So one of the things that Microsoft admitted was something we sort of felt like we knew, which was that they sold fewer than half, as many Xbox ones as Sony sold PlayStation fours during the previous console generation.

Leo Laporte (01:30:42):
Oh, that's not good

Paul Thurrott (01:30:43):
To put that in perspective, both of those companies sold about the same number of previous gen Xbox 360 PlayStation three consoles. The PlayStation three actually did come out ahead, but it was, it was actually very close about 80. I think it was 82 million somewhere in that range. Sony sold 117 point something million PS, four S do the math. It's some 50, I guessed 50 to 55.

Leo Laporte (01:31:09):
So the actual, the actual filing said Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales installed base, having sold more than TWiTce, as many as did Xbox in the last generation. So that's Xbox one and it's half whatever Sony sold,

Paul Thurrott (01:31:26):
Couple of data points on that. Sony publishes exact numbers of what they sell. So we know what that is. So that's how we can do the math on it. Microsoft used to provide console sales numbers, but stop with the Xbox one surprise, cuz they were so bad. We know some of the reasons, you know, that we know the submarine story, you know, whether we're gonna have the online requirement, we know that it shipped with connect, which caused it to cost a hundred dollars more than the place you think that's it for the first year

Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
That really killed me.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:52):
I, I think those contributed

Leo Laporte (01:31:54):
To it. People just had the perception that it's a hundred bucks more for an Xbox.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:58):
Well, it was, I mean, mean, you know, it was, it was literally a hundred bucks more. Yeah. So the, the sad thing there is that through the Xbox one S and then X, they honestly, they did a fantastic job of improving that console over time. The nice thing is when we look forward to the new generation Xbox series X and S and then of course what they're doing in the cloud and all the subscription services Xbox today is in a great place. I don't remember the exact number, but SA Adela during the recent conference, you know, earnings conference call said that Xbox has outsold Sony in the United States. I think it was for the four previous consecutive months, maybe three, but it's been out selling, they've been out selling Sony at least at home. So, but they're not beating Sony. Are they as the, no, he would've said that.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:47):
<Laugh> so, no, I don't think he's no, but you want them to be competitive? I, I feel like they are competitive. It, it's probably closer to what we saw with the 360 in the PS three. So really consultation. The one was just a blip. It was, it was just a, a aberration well, and Microsoft is also changing the game by pushing really heavily into game streaming. Right. And that there's been some filings around that. I mean Microsoft complained, I don't have this in the notes, but that Sony has been paying published is not to put their games on game pass. Because they're trying to prevent that from becoming too successful while they build up their own service. Microsoft, no Sony has complained that if Microsoft gets active vision blizzard, they might take call of duty and other games off of PlayStation five.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:36):
That doesn't make any sense. <Laugh> like most, I think I'm sure over half of console gamers are gonna be on Sony. And actually now that we, now that we're on that topic, I should say it's a simple fix for the solution or for this problem, which is the reason we're going through this regulatory process and that's compromising, right. In other words, the EU, the United States, or some other regulatory body could come down and say, look, you can have Activision blizzard that you have to promise. You're gonna keep putting these games on other platforms, you know, that kind of thing. And that those, those are the types of compromises that come out of these regulatory reviews. So I think this is the reason for these filings, and I think that's what we're gonna see in the end. So I expect Microsoft to, to get active vision blizzard unless exciting news, where are we in the list?

Paul Thurrott (01:34:23):
Some these things are all in different orders now. It's, we're, we're kind of heading into the second half of August. And so Microsoft has released the schedule for the games. They've released a game pass over the second half of the month. There's a lot of, is often the case for me. I don't see anything for me, <laugh> this list, but there are eight new games coming over the next several days. So you can look forward to that across console cloud and PC. And I, yeah, I did this in the wrong order and Sony you know, Sony, like Nintendo used to be very specifically on their own platform. And that was it. Nintendo has dabbled in mobile and not done enough, frankly. I don't know why they don't just put all the old games on mobile, but whatever Sony has been getting into the PC space.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:07):
So one of the things they've done over the past year is announced that they're bringing a lot of their biggest and best games to the PC, which is kind of interesting, you know, you think in these day and age, maybe they would just look at the cloud and say, you know, we don't need to worry about the PC, but I guess it's big enough. And now there is I dunno if this is a rumor, but there are indications that Sony might be working on their own game launcher for the PC, because God knows we don't, you know, we need one, one more of those, but that could be coming path. So we'll see. And then finally Google is revealed that, or I'm not sure if they've revealed or it's been revealed by people. Who've seen it that when you search for games that are available from cloud streaming services not just stadia, but also Xbox cloud gaming, Amazon Luna, and GForce now you will actually get results that will click or link directly to that game. Wow. And you can just launch it, launch it from there, right. Maybe that's what Microsoft meant when they were talking about launching the star without being in the store.

Leo Laporte (01:36:05):
That's pretty wild.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:07):
Yeah. That's neat. It's like, I I'd like to play this game right now. Click,

Leo Laporte (01:36:10):
Do you think they would've done that if they didn't have stadia? Like, and they probably, if it weren't for the EU, they would've made it in stadia, you

Paul Thurrott (01:36:18):
Know, state only I was actually surprised it wasn't stadia only frankly, although

Leo Laporte (01:36:22):
A lot of scrutiny for self dealing right now. So

Paul Thurrott (01:36:25):
I was gonna say exactly. I think if they had gone that route, they would've been there would've been complaints and that would've changed. So yeah. Anyway, thank God for regulation, yay

Leo Laporte (01:36:33):
Or something right. For regulation.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:37):
Is that everything? I think that's everything. Yeah. That's everything. So a lot of stuff going on this week,

Leo Laporte (01:36:42):
Hey, Hey, well, if that's everything, you know what that means? We're gonna do the back of the book next back of the book begins as always with Paul Thra a tip of the week, which he it's. I was really surprised that you didn't mention this in the Xbox segment, but now I see why he saved it from the Xbox segment. That's right. To make the Xbox segment even longer. Go ahead.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:07):
Yeah. If you're <laugh> right. The Xbox segment often bleeds into the back of the book. So if you're a fan of call duty, as I am, you know, that call duty mono warfare for two, the, the remake, well, it's, it's a reimagining. It's not really a remake, right? It's not exactly the same game, but is coming out this fall. You probably also know that last year's game. Vanguard was a relative bomb in the call of duty world. I mean, still sold, you know, tens or hundreds of millions, whatever units they sell every year. But gamers didn't like, I, I actually, I like the world war II thing. I think it's been out play overplayed. I, I, the multiplayer is terrible. I don't quite understand what happened there this year is gonna be huge. There's no doubt about that, but they have lost all kinds of players.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:49):
And I think, sorry, I think what they're trying to do is get a little excitement going here, cuz this one does look fantastic. So we already knew that if you pre-ordered the game, this is across different platforms, whatever platform you want, you could take place in a multiplayer beter, which we now know is happening in the somewhere in the second half of September. But they revealed this week that if you pre-order the game, you'll be able to get the campaign up to a week early. Now that language suggests that it might be a different timeframe based on how you're playing it. That's not the case. I think they actually just don't know when it will be available, but sometime like up to a week before the game is generally available. If you pre-order and you know, you can, pre-install it digitally right on whatever platform you have, you will be able to play the campaign.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:31):
That's actually really interesting because one of the problems we call it duty is most of the games have both obviously campaign and multiplayer. You don't know kind of which one to do from day one. And I, I made the mistake many years ago of always, I used to always do campaign first. So a week, you know, two weeks or month or whatever was into the game being available. I would switch to multiplayer and starting with the call of duty four that got really complex. And I found myself in a game. I didn't understand playing against people who had been there for weeks and, you know, knew all the nuances and you know, it, it leads to a kind of a weird issue like, which do I play first? Or how do I, how do I do this? And so if you pre-order, you can just play the campaign first. It's kind of an neat little kind of an neat little perk. And I, and I think again, I think it's designed to stop the the flow of gamers. We're leaving, you know, leaving call duty, but

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
I don't think this is the first game to do this either. I think other games have done this.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:26):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:39:26):
I'm trying to remember which one.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:28):
Yeah. It's a good idea.

Leo Laporte (01:39:29):
Maybe destiny or something where you could, you could do the cam, you could start it and then and then the full game would come out anyway. It's definitely incentive. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:39):
Yep, yep. Yep. So Leo, I remember you were away when I said this for some reason, because I know I wanted to talk to you about it, but I switched to the brave web browser whenever you were away in July. Yeah. Or, or baby June or July. And I actually, the thing that's happened since then is I've also switched to brave on mobile devices. I used to kind of use different device, different browsers based on what you know, device. Right but I actually use this across devices makes

Leo Laporte (01:40:05):
Sense. Cause it a lot a sync. Right. So you'd bring everything over to the mobile. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:09):
Yeah. But it also makes sense because the reason you want to use it on a PC is the same. You would want to use it on mobile, which is it's literally the most private web browser. The problem on iOS of course, is that apple forces use use their webcat based web kit based engine. Right. Right. And apple does their own, you know, they do a decent job, even brave says, you know, they do. Okay. But they also kind of point out the problem with Apple's approach is that you get the good, which is great, but you also get the bad and Brave's own browser goes much further blocking trackers and protecting your privacy than apple does. So what's interesting is over the past few months, they've really, you know, they've released regular updates for this browser as all browsers do. They've actually found ways to work around the limitations on iOS.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:50):
And now the claim they're making is that brave is in fact, the most secure and most private web browser you can use on that platform. They go through a list of what they did to make that happen. And it's kind of interesting, but I, I, the thing that I am most interested in is this notion of Apple's restrictions, preventing third party browsers from in this case using the full range of advanced best in class privacy protections that they built for elsewhere. So if you use it on Android or Mac or PC or whatever, you know, you get these features that you haven't to date been able to get on iOS. So it doesn't have the full suite of protections you get elsewhere. But it actually, you know, compared to say three or four months ago, it's a dramatic improvement. I don't know what the percentage is, you know, 50, 70%, but it's they've been able to do a lot more on iOS than they thought. Good. So I guess the point here is if you, yeah, if you use brave or even if you don't you should consider using it on iOS as well.

Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
I'm sure they're not doing anything apple says you can't do. So they've just figured out, are you, I don't know. I use I use Firefox focus, which is a, a privacy on iOS, which is privacy focused. In fact, Firefox focus. Once you install, it can also be used as as a filter on safari. So it becomes, you know, interesting a blocking on safari. So everything goes through focus. I wonder check and see if brave now can be used, even when you're using safari, if brave can be used to protect your private

Paul Thurrott (01:42:15):
To block

Leo Laporte (01:42:16):
Or as a blocker

Paul Thurrott (01:42:17):
Block trackers. Yeah. As a

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
Blocker.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:18):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
Yeah. Okay. That's how that's how Firefox did it? Oh, curious. Well, I will have to download it and try it. I just, you know, I just use safari because I figure, well, it's all safari at, at, at the bottom. Yep. Red con five is put a, put the F from brave in here. Let me see if they talk about how they get around apples restrictions,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:43):
The blog posts they have about these changes is worth reading. Just to see the various ways they worked around apples. Clever yeah. Restrictions. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:54):
Do you have to think they were nervous about

Leo Laporte (01:42:56):
<Laugh>? Yeah, but you also have to think that apple just like Microsoft and Google little chasing by you know, the EU and others and mm-hmm, <affirmative> maybe not as aggressively there.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:08):
Right. Maybe this is good timing. Yeah. It's

Leo Laporte (01:43:10):
True. Could be you have an app pick. Oh, that was your app pick.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:13):
Yeah, that was yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:43:14):
Brave on iOS. Mary Jo Foley has an enterprise pick of the week. Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:20):
I do. My enterprise pick is for anyone who is still using Skype for business server. And there are a lot of companies that are on premises. The bad news is Microsoft said back in 2020, that we're definitely going to have another version of Skype for business server on premises. And in 20 21, 20 21 came and went 20, 22 is here now nothing. In June, they told me we're gonna gonna have an update shortly about what we're gonna do for those people who wanna run the next version of Skype for business on prem. So this week they came up with a blog post, a long blog post about, yeah, we said we were gonna do this in 2020. And here's, here's what we're telling people now, which is go to Skype for business server 2019, which will be supported until 2025. And if you're asking about the mystery product, we have nothing more to share.

Mary Jo Foley (01:44:18):
We don't have any update on at this time, at this time, at this time, we have no update on when we're gonna talk about the next version V next, we aren't gonna tell you yet how long it's gonna be supported, how you can transition from the current Skype for business to that version. It's a little frustrating because I get this, I get questions about this quite a bit for people who say I don't, I either am not ready or willing to move to teams and I wanna stay on Skype for business. And they said I was gonna have another version on prem. The answer is right now, we don't know when you're gonna hear more about the next version. All they're saying is if you wanna make sure you're covered move to Skype for business server 2019, which is supported until October 20, 25. So it's a little frustrating, but that's all we know at this point, if you're looking to update on that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:07):
And now we have both a transmitter and a transformer. I think we'll start with the transformer and then go to the transplant.

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:13):
Yes, yes. I didn't even realize I did that. That's fine. Yeah. I thought, Hmm. <Laugh> the code name is latte.

Leo Laporte (01:45:22):
Ooh, I like it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:24):
Small capital L lowercase, a double capital T T lowercase E ah, stands for it. Language trajectory, transformer. That's a mouthful. What it is is very interesting. It's the idea of combining natural language commands and robotics. So if you think about how to program a robot, the easiest way would be, if you could just talk to it, right. <Laugh> it would be like, Hey robot, don't go so close to this bunch of glasses that are on the counter. Move back. That'd be great. If you could just program a robot that way. So Microsoft's trying to make that happen. With this latte, they, they say they're building a framework that embodies two key ideas. One is you can use pre-train language models to give rich user representations, to people who are programming robots. And then they have this whole calculation for geometrical trajectory data with natural language. They posted a paper this week. If you're into this kind of thing, autonomous systems and robotics, you might wanna go check it out. I, I have a link in the notes to it. It's a whole white paper they've got on this. They've got a webpage, they've got a GitHub repository. That explains what they're doing. And very interestingly to me, a week later, Google announced that was this week that they're doing the same thing. Yeah. Right. <laugh> <laugh> they're also working on combining natural language and robotics and figuring that out. It

Leo Laporte (01:46:54):
Makes sense though, because if we're gonna have robots ubiquitous in the home and stuff, you're not gonna, oh, excuse me. After launch my Python to change the robots behavior. Exactly. No. You wanna be able to talk to it and say, stop walking in the wall.

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:09):
Exactly, exactly. And I think it's funny, they call it Microsoft called this latte because codename historians like myself, right. May recall that project latte was a codename. Microsoft used for the windows subsystem for Android. Oh, this is just a little different because of the way they capitalize it. Yeah. Kind of weird.

Leo Laporte (01:47:29):
<Laugh> that's the transformer.

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:31):
That's the transformer.

Leo Laporte (01:47:32):
Now let's do the transmitter.

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:34):
Yes. There's a brewery in Brooklyn called transmitter brewing. They, they're in, they're a little different from many breweries right now because they're trying to make Bel a lot of Belgian styles and non IPA styles.

Leo Laporte (01:47:48):
My favorites. Yes. Good.

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:50):
Everybody's doing IPAs. Let's do something else. Right. <laugh> that's right. So they make, they make a beer called they actually, the way they label their beers is a letter and a number. It was a brewery formed by two former ad guys. And they do things like a three B12. This is w four,

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
They're tired of writing clever names. So <laugh>, they that's hysterical.

Mary Jo Foley (01:48:10):
They are. So this is called w four. It's a dry hopped goer. So goer beers are the ones that are a little bit salty and they're little bit sour. It's a, so this one is a perfect combination of salt and sour. It's got coriander in it. It's got some salt, it's got a special kind of hop called motu AKA, which gives a very citrusy flavor. And this keeps kind of like lime flavor. And so my, my takeaway is it's not just bud and Corona that you need with lime. Yeah. You could have a beer that has lime flavor already built in just from the hops. And that's what the study this is refreshing before is it sounds like very refreshing. Yeah. Light refreshing. Just, you could, you could sit there and drink a whole bunch and they're like 5% really like a nice amount of lime, not overkill on the lime. It doesn't taste cloying or fake. It's just very like when you drink, you're like, oh, that's so refreshing. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so if you ever wanna go to transmitter and you're in New York, they're in the Brooklyn Navy yard and you can take a ferry for Manhattan and just go over and drink a beautiful dry hop goes there.

Leo Laporte (01:49:11):
I wish I, you were with me when we go. We go to Petaluma has now you've. I think you've probably been there. You, last time you were here, you went to the place that has like a hundred beers on tap, but they have a new beer garden called Brewsters. It's not that news been around for a while, but it's outside. They have music. They've it's shady treeline thing and they oh, nice. And they have some really good beers and you know, I'm looking at, 'em going, I just wish Mary Jo were here. So I had a gen tonic instead, but Aw, Aw. <Laugh> but if, but if next time I'll probably just take a picture of the menu. Yeah. And and say, what should I be drinking here? Let me see if they, well, you have some, you have some pretty good beer guys at, at TWiTt, as I recall.

Leo Laporte (01:49:56):
Yeah. I could just ask them, but you know, I trust you. They could, they, you know, they, I think you're, you're my expert, my local expert. <Laugh> Hey, that does it for this edition of windows weekly. Thank you very much. So you're coming home tomorrow, Paul or later today? Tomorrow. All right. Well, next week we'll be back in sunny, Pennsylvania. Yeah, boy, little boy. <Laugh> <laugh> you're I tell you you're winning Lisa over. Keep taking beautiful pictures. I will. It, it really makes me want to go to Mexico city. You'll find Paul online@thra.com join the premium part of that because there's great premium content. In addition to the tons of free content, he also publishes his books@leanpub.com. The latest field guide to windows 10, the field guided windows 11 is imminent. He'll be writing it on the plane home. Like probably I was working on it on the plane here.

Leo Laporte (01:50:51):
I thought so. Yes. Yeah, I can tell. And Mary Jo Foley is at senior senior contributing writer at ZD net. Her blog is all about microsoft.com. Thank you both for being here. We do windows weeklys on Wednesdays around 11:00 AM Pacific that's 2:00 PM Eastern time, 1800 UTC. You can tune in and watch us do it live@livedotTWiT.tv. If you're watching live chat, live the IRC open all@ircdotTWiT.tv discord, of course, for club TWiTt members. That's part of your benefit. Add free versions of the shows like hands on windows with Mr. Paul thro and the club TWiTt discord and the TWiTt plus feed with all the shows that we don't normally put out in public and extra stuff that we, we makes doesn't make past the cutting room floor. That's all at TWiT TV slash club, TWiT seven bucks a month.

Leo Laporte (01:51:51):
There's a yearly plan corporate plans as well. And you could just get hands on windows for instance, into any individual show for 2 99 a month. So it's, you know, if you just want that show, that's fine. What else? Oh, on demand versions of the show available for free at the website, TWiT.tv/ww, there's also a YouTube channel dedicated to windows weekly and of course, best thing to do. Be subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it weekly, automatically the minute it's available. And if you do subscribe in a podcast player, leave us a five star review. Let the world know about the best windows show in the windows weekly. Thank you. You dozers and you winners. We'll see you next two. Wednesday. Bye bye.